The prevalence of infectious diseases are particularly elevated in Africa because of environmental factors and limited health infrastructure such as health facilities and services. Diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and other illnesses have spread rapidly. According to reports, thousands of children under the age of five die each year as a result of diseases such as malaria. For example, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa between 2014 and 2016 resulted in over 11,000 fatalities. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in over 12.38 million cases of infection and approximately 257 thousand deaths between February 2020 and October 2022 across the African continent. Thus, the continent that did not initiate COVID-19 and effectively used limited resources to keep deaths and infections below global averages may suffer severely from the pandemic's socio-economic repercussions due to difficulties surrounding vaccine access (see figure 1).

Figure 1: Africa's temperature anomalies, 1920 – 2020 (degrees Celsius)