How Nigeria is leveraging Zipline to vaccinate zero-dose children

ABUJA, Nigeria (9th December 2024) — Today, Gavi and Zipline are announcing an integrated care program designed to improve health outcomes for zero-dose and under-immunized children and their families. The program aims to not only vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children over the next two years, but will also provide them and their families with treatment for severe acute malnutrition, deworming medication, vitamin A supplements, family planning services, and other vital primary care supplies.

Gavi is focusing on innovative programs in Nigeria because more zero-dose children—about 2.25 million—live in Nigeria than in any other country in Africa. These children and their families are more likely to face difficulty accessing education, clean water, sanitation, nutrition and healthcare. As a result, children who don’t receive any vaccines account for a third of all child deaths.

Because zero-dose children are generally unreachable by routine immunization services, Gavi is leveraging Zipline drone delivery, which is an established means of transporting medical goods and supplies in certain states in Nigeria, to bring the vaccines to them. Zipline is currently delivering medical supplies directly to staff at health centers and to trained Community Health Workers at delivery points near known clusters of zero-dose children, which Gavi and state partners have helped Zipline identify.

In its first few months of activity, this initiative has helped immunize more than 16,000 zero-dose children, provided nutritional supplementation to more than 9,000 children, and helped more than 1,500 new mothers access sexual and reproductive health services.

“We are deploying an extremely targeted response that we expect will significantly improve vaccination rates in parts of Nigeria over the next two years. Our goal is to bring the type of impact we’ve seen through our partnership with Zipline in Ghana to communities in Nigeria who stand to benefit immediately from better access to care,” says Augustin Flory, Managing Director, Innovative Partnerships and Development Finance at Gavi.

In Ghana, Zipline’s partnership with the Ministry of Health improved vaccination rates in Zipline-served areas by between 13 and 37 percentage points across all vaccines in the routine immunization schedule during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time that the World Health Organization calls “the largest continued backslide in vaccinations in three decades.” 

A forthcoming study conducted by Ghana Health Service and Zipline on the system’s cost-effectiveness for childhood immunization shows that across more than 19 million vaccine doses delivered by Zipline, governments incurred a net cost of $0.66 per fully-immunized child, making Zipline more cost-effective than any other established immunization intervention identified in peer-reviewed literature.

The new program is funded by Gavi and a collective of donors, including The UPS Foundation, The ELMA Foundation, IFPW and a number of high net worth individuals. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the United Kingdom is also matching these contributions, which are now focused on scaling the platform to enable greater impact and cost-effectiveness in immunization and primary health care delivery.

“Providing remote locations with vaccine doses is essential to give children across the world a fairer start in life,” says Anneliese Dodds, The UK Minister for Development. “The UK is proud to be using our Gavi match funding to leverage private investment, drive innovation and support the health of families in Nigeria through the Zipline drone project.”

In Nigeria, these partners will enable delivery of an estimated 2.3 million vaccine doses to fully immunize 121,000 zero-dose children, provide Vitamin A supplements and deworming pills to hundreds of thousands of children, treat more than 2 million cases of diarrhea in children under five years old, and help nearly 120,000 new mothers access sexual and reproductive health services.

“Our partnership with Gavi and Zipline represents a significant milestone in health service delivery in the State,” says Dr. Vivien Mesembe Otu, Director General of the Cross River State Primary Health Care Development Agency. “By applying Zipline’s agile supply chain to vaccination efforts, we’re able to establish far more local, convenient dosing sites, making vaccines and other needed care easier to access. We believe this approach has the potential to drastically reduce zero-dose prevalence and sustain those gains over the long-term.”

What makes this model profoundly exciting to both donors and local partners is not only the opportunity to reach the unreachable, but also the ability to foster and scale new models of sustainable development. Zipline and local partners are working together to evaluate the impact of this model. If proven to be high-impact and cost-effective, the plan is to replicate this intervention in other states and countries.

This announcement comes on the heels of the launch of the RTS,S malaria vaccine in Nigeria last week. The first malaria vaccines were flown by drone in Bayelsa State, and Zipline has already delivered more than 2,000 doses. Over the coming weeks, deliveries of RTS,S will be further incorporated into the new integrated care program.

About Zipline

Zipline was founded to create the first logistics system that serves all humans equally. The company designs, manufactures and operates the world’s largest autonomous logistics system that is used every day by businesses, governments and consumers. Zipline’s fully electric and autonomous drones reduce delivery emissions by up to 97% compared to gas cars. Zipline has flown more than 100 million autonomous kilometers, and has delivered millions of items including more than 19 million vaccine doses. For more information, please visit www.flyzipline.com.

About Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance is a public-private partnership that helps vaccinate more than half the world’s children against some of the world’s deadliest diseases. The Vaccine Alliance brings together developing country and donor governments, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank, the vaccine industry, technical agencies, civil society, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other private sector partners. View the full list of donor governments and other leading organisations that fund Gavi’s work here.

Since its inception in 2000, Gavi has helped to immunise a whole generation – over 1 billion children – and prevented more than 17.3 million future deaths, helping to halve child mortality in 78 lower-income countries. Gavi also plays a key role in improving global health security by supporting health systems as well as funding global stockpiles for Ebola, cholera, meningococcal and yellow fever vaccines. After two decades of progress, Gavi is now focused on protecting the next generation, above all the zero-dose children who have not received even a single vaccine shot. The Vaccine Alliance employs innovative finance and the latest technology – from drones to biometrics – to save lives, prevent outbreaks before they can spread and help countries on the road to self-sufficiency. Learn more at www.gavi.org and connect with us on Facebook and X (Twitter).