NGO facilitates delivery of 9m vaccine doses in far-flung areas with digital innovation

EHealth Africa, a non-governmental organisation, says it has facilitated the delivery of nine million vaccine doses in hard-to-reach areas in the country.

Atef Fawaz, executive director of the organisation, spoke on Wednesday at a workshop themed “Digital innovations in public health practice: Lessons and impact”.

Fawaz said the delivery was facilitated through the logistic management information systems (LoMIS), an initiative of eHealth Africa.

LoMIS is a suite of offline-capable mobile and web applications “LoMIS stock” and “LoMIS deliver” which address challenges with the supply and distribution of health commodities.

The applications provide solutions to ensure the availability of health commodities, and effective vaccine management, and enable broader health system policy decisions through the use of real data for insight and execution at the community, state and national levels.

Fawaz said the vaccine delivery solution was developed to make sure no one is left unvaccinated due to logistical challenges.

“Most of our solutions are all driven by an analysis of the need of what the problem is,” he said.

“So we always try to identify a problem and work around solving it. We all know the challenges in the whole nation when it comes to logistics, especially in very remote areas.

“The solution was developed to make sure that vaccines can reach everywhere and at the same time focus a lot on accountability and transparency so everyone can see at what point the vaccines were picked from, and where they are delivered.

“It’s a full system that allows monitoring of stocks, request of new stocks, and making sure that vaccines are delivered to very remote areas.

“We have proved that by running the project in Kano, Bauchi, Zamfara and Sokoto. And we deliver to basically all the health facilities.

“The impact is, more than nine million doses of vaccines have been delivered, and this has never been done before.

“This has a direct impact on everyone’s health, especially children from zero to five who need to get their routine immunisation.”