Helping children and families access life-saving vaccines

Vaccinating children against known diseases saves lives, improves quality of life, and protects people in communities. Yet, nearly 9.7 million children have never received a dose of crucial routine vaccines.1  

“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,” says Bertrand Pedersen, senior manager of private partnerships and vaccination at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, an organization working to vaccinate all children. 

In Ghana, one of the barriers to vaccinating children has been logistics. Before Zipline, healthcare workers in Ghana serving hard-to-reach communities had to drive trucks to collect vaccines from a regional cold room, then drive them to health centers hours away.

In 2019, Zipline partnered with the Ghana Ministry of Health, the Ghana Health Service, and Gavi to add on-demand, instant aerial delivery to Ghana’s existing logistics system. This significantly extended the country’s cold-chain. With Zipline, healthcare workers could order vaccines on-demand, rather than drive for hours. 

On-demand deliveries also kept vaccines in stock at health centers, reducing missed opportunities for vaccination, which happen whenever a healthcare worker doesn’t vaccinate an eligible patient. Missed opportunities frequently happen due to vaccine stockouts and have devastating public health consequences. Especially in remote areas, when people travel for hours to receive care only to miss a vaccination, that opportunity is usually gone forever. 

In Ghana, Zipline delivery of vaccines reduced missed opportunities for vaccination by 44%.2 All told, Zipline has delivered around 9.5 million doses of routine vaccines in Ghana since it launched in 2019, with nearly 4 million of those deliveries occurring in 2023. The result is that the proportion of children receiving each recommended vaccine increased, on average, by 21 percentage points in Zipline-served districts compared to others in Ghana’s Western North Region. 

Based on Ghana’s success, Zipline has launched vaccination programs in Nigeria in partnership with Gavi and the UPS Foundation. Since launching in Nigeria in 2022, Zipline has delivered more than 1.5 million doses of routine vaccines, the majority of which have gone to children who otherwise never would have been vaccinated.

In 2023, Zipline also launched a program in Rwanda to make vaccines available at health posts, which are within a 25-minute walk of every Rwandan. This cuts out the need for transportation, which costs an average of $14.583 for all six immunization sessions, a price that is cost-prohibitive for many families. Within the first month of operations in December 2023, 451 children were vaccinated, resulting in an estimated $1,095 in total household savings. 

All told, in 2023, Zipline delivered 16 types of vaccines to over 2,500 health facilities in 5 countries.