How Gavi leverages technology to solve the world’s hardest health challenges

Before Gavi was founded in 2000, only 59% of children globally received basic vaccines against diseases such as measles and polio. Today, 81% of children are vaccinated, an accomplishment that Gavi helped achieve. 

“We’ve shown we can cover more than 80% of children with vaccines. But now, we are aiming to reach the last 20% — many of whom are known as ‘zero-dose children,’ or children who’ve never received a vaccine,” says Bertrand Pedersen, senior manager of private sector partnerships and innovation at Gavi.  “Those children are the most difficult to reach and the focus of our strategy.”

To reach the last 20%, Pedersen explains, Gavi must not only invest in cutting-edge R&D, but also solutions that improve the nuts and bolts of healthcare. Pedersen’s work involves finding new, innovative approaches to logistical issues like planning vaccination campaigns, organizing healthcare records and, in Zipline’s case, delivering vaccines on demand. 

Zipline and Gavi first partnered in Rwanda in 2016, and have since worked together to launch and scale deliveries of routine and COVID-19 vaccines in Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya. This May, Zipline and Gavi expanded their partnership to launch a zero-dose vaccination program in Kaduna State, Nigeria where now only 37% of children access crucial vaccines. Already, Zipline has delivered more than 1.1 million doses to children who live in areas in Nigeria that can only be reached safely through aerial logistics. 

Pedersen spoke to Zipline about how Gavi chooses partners who can make vaccination campaigns as efficient as possible and why, in many cases, the best answer to a problem is the smart application of a solution that already exists. 

How do you approach vaccinating the hardest-to-reach children in the world? Where do you start? 

Everything starts with the country’s needs, and we build around that. What challenges exist? What solutions do we have? And if we don’t have one, how can we catalyze the creation of one? 

When you talk about innovation, you often think of shiny new technology. But some solutions that already exist can have a huge impact when applied to immunization — these aren’t always technical solutions.  

What’s an example of a non-technical solution? 

It could be a training program, for example, to make sure that healthcare workers in areas with limited access to vaccines have the skills they need. 

We owe healthcare workers so much. What about a payment solution for people on the front lines to make sure they’re appropriately compensated? There’s a real need to address these types of underlying issues. 

The majority of my work doesn’t deal with new vaccines or products, though we have a team that does that. My focus is making sure the product goes from manufacturing to shots in arms in the most efficient way. 

Do you get those efficiencies primarily through new technology? 

Gavi is not aiming to get the latest technology out there, it’s about getting the right approach that works in a specific environment. Usually, that means it doesn’t require reliable electricity or a stable Internet connection to function. It also has to be extremely user-friendly. 

Zipline meets that need, even though a fleet of autonomous drones is obviously high-tech. But for people who order medical products through Zipline, it’s as simple as sending a text. That’s the type of solution that can make a real difference. 

Take our work together in Kaduna State. Aerial drones are the only safe way to send supplies. It’s a place with limited infrastructure and unreliable access to power. But we’ve figured out how to introduce a user-friendly solution in a difficult environment. 

Besides deliveries, so much goes into improving vaccination rates. Where else are you bringing in startups to help? 

One of the main issues we’re up against is linking children to their health records through their or their mother’s fingerprints. 

Fingerprint recognition is widely available. We all unlock our phones this way. For many of us, it’s second nature. Still, this can go a long way towards improving access when applied to child immunizations. 

So we’re working with a company in Bangladesh and Ghana on a simple, biometric solution to make sure every child is registered and receives critical vaccines.

Other startup partners, or “PaceSetters,” are working on issues like protecting vaccines from variations in temperature through a remote monitoring device, tracking vaccines across the supply chain and planning accurate vaccine campaigns using big data. 

Our work with Zipline and so many other PaceSetters means that now we have a set of companies that we can showcase as examples to prove that global health is a viable market, that we have companies thriving in that industry, that innovation can be tested, applied and taken up by the country, and that you can impact lives and still have a sustainable business. 

I can say this type of engagement with the private sector has been a fundamental driver of our success. 

How do you see Gavi’s partnership with Zipline evolving? 

We need to cover the last 20% of zero-dose children and we’re introducing programs for vaccines against HPV and malaria. For those to succeed, we need new approaches and groundbreaking ideas.

There is so much that goes into getting one shot into the arm of a child who lives in one of these areas we’re targeting. You need trained healthcare workers on the ground, awareness and trust among people in communities, storage for vaccines and a way to physically get them from where they are refrigerated to where they are given to the child. Zipline makes the storage and transportation piece easier in many of the areas where we work and possible for places that were effectively unreachable before. That’s why drone delivery will be an integral part of our strategy. 

At Zipline, we believe that logistics that serve humans equally can help solve some of the most pressing global health challenges. Periodically, we share research, articles and insights with the global development community.