Nigeria Introduces New Malaria Prevention Program for Infants Nationwide

Nigeria's health ministry has started the formal process of taking a malaria prevention program nationwide for children under two, after a three-year study found it could cut malaria illness among infants by up to a third in some of the country's hardest-hit regions.

A Second Shield for a Different Kind of Malaria Season

The program is called Perennial Malaria Chemoprevention, or PMC.

It gives infants a course of preventive antimalarial medicine, not a vaccine, timed to protect them during their most vulnerable early months.

It is built for places where malaria transmission does not follow a season. It happens all year.

That is the key difference from Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention, or SMC, the program Nigeria has used for years in its northern states, where malaria surges with the rains and eases in the dry months.

Southern Nigeria does not get that break. A child there can be exposed to malaria in January just as easily as in July, which is exactly the gap PMC is designed to close.

What Happened in Abuja

Nigeria's Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Dr. Iziaq Adekunle Salako, announced the policy shift on August 5 at a meeting in Abuja, the country's capital.

The meeting brought together government officials, researchers and international partners to review results from a study that has been testing PMC's real-world feasibility since 2023.

Salako directed the Department of Public Health and the National Malaria Elimination Programme to begin the policy work needed to introduce PMC on a larger scale.

The study behind that decision, known as the PMC Effect Study, was run by the National Malaria Elimination Programme alongside the international nonprofit Malaria Consortium, with funding from the Gates Foundation.

What the Study Found

Applied at national scale, researchers say that range translates into tens of thousands of malaria episodes prevented among some of the youngest and most vulnerable children in the country.

The study also looked at how PMC could actually reach children, not just whether it works. It found the medicine can be delivered through Nigeria's existing routine childhood immunization visits, the same appointments where infants already get scheduled vaccines.

That matters because it means the government would not need to build a new, parallel system just to deliver PMC, which researchers say keeps the cost of scaling it up manageable.

Nigeria's Malaria Numbers, in Context

Salako also pointed to broader progress. Citing the 2025 Nigeria Malaria Indicator Survey, he said national malaria prevalence has fallen from 42 percent in 2010 to 15 percent in 2025, a decline he credited to sustained government interventions and international partnerships over that period.

That progress has not closed the gap with the rest of the world. Salako said Nigeria still accounts for close to a quarter of malaria cases and roughly three in ten malaria deaths recorded globally.

Those figures are broadly consistent with the World Health Organization's most recent global malaria report, which found the WHO African Region carried 94 percent of the world's estimated 282 million malaria cases and 95 percent of its 610,000 malaria deaths in 2024, with Nigeria named among the handful of countries driving the largest share of that toll.

Nigeria Would Not Be Starting From Zero

According to the same WHO report, at least eight countries had already introduced some form of PMC by 2024, reaching close to a million infants under 24 months with their first dose that year.

Nigeria's move would extend that approach to one of the continent's largest child populations, in a country where the WHO says three in four regional malaria deaths occur in children under five.

What Still Has to Happen

The announcement fits inside Nigeria's broader National Malaria Strategic Plan for 2026 to 2030, which the ministry says will guide how it strengthens health systems and integrates services as it works toward its stated goal of eliminating malaria as a public health threat.

For now, the evidence from three years of field testing has moved PMC from a research question to a policy decision. What comes next, in Nigeria's statehouses and health budgets, will determine how soon it reaches the children it is designed to protect.