Malaria also makes children tired and sickly for a fraction of every year. Not having malaria will improve quality of life and help education for a much larger population even than the population that would have died from malaria.

I looked for some references (10 percent absenteeism due to being ill, one fourth sick during an 11 week period, not so high in some other studies) but my impression anecdotally is that fighting malaria makes you very tired, which might be harder to quantify.