"Each new vaccine delivery in Africa is another step towards equity," said the director of the WHO regional office for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, during the weekly press conference on the covid-19 pandemic.
"It is critical that health workers and other priority groups are at the front of the queue" to be vaccinated, he added.
According to WHO, these 22 African countries have received about 14.8 million doses through Covax, of which 518,000 have already been administered.
The latest African nations to join the list of recipients were Benin, where 144,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine arrived on Wednesday - out of a total of 792,000 to be sent to the country in the coming months - and Sierra Leone, which received 96,000 AstraZeneca doses on Tuesday as part of an initial batch of 528,000.
The other African countries where vaccines against the new coronavirus have already landed are Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Gambia, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali, Liberia, Togo, Sao Tome and Principe, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, Mozambique, Malawi, Botswana and Lesotho.
The Covax platform - driven by WHO and the Alliance for Vaccines (Gavi) - seeks to ensure global and equitable access to antiviral drugs and aims to provide at least 2 billion doses by the end of the year.
In parallel to these efforts, another group of African nations is already vaccinating thanks to the solutions they were able to find through bilateral agreements with pharmaceutical producers.
This is the case, for example, with Morocco, Seychelles, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Egypt, and Sierra Leone.
Despite this progress, Africa and its 1.3 billion people still lag behind globally in terms of immunization progress: of the 55 African Union (AU) member states, only 19 have started national immunization campaigns.
The continent has recorded 3,989,874 cases and 106,682 deaths from covid-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to data compiled by the African Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), an agency of the African Union.
The covid-19 pandemic has caused at least 2,621,295 deaths worldwide, resulting from more than 117.9 million cases of infection, according to an assessment by the French agency AFP.
The disease is transmitted by a new coronavirus detected in late 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
