News24com Gates Foundation Unicef ink R22bn guarantee to back Covid-19 jabs in poorer countries

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), and UNICEF on Friday announced a $150 million (~R2.2bn) financial guarantee to help the latter procure vaccines and other health-related supplies for low- and middle-income countries.

The announcement comes amid ongoing concerns over slow vaccine rollout in poorer nations.

The Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility (Covax), led by the World Health Organisation and with Unicef on board as procurement coordinator, was intended to help equalise access. But it has faced funding and distribution challenges.

Covax has been working to tackle supply and procurement hurdles. But still, by the end of October, just five African countries were projected to hit the year-end goal of vaccinating 40% of the population, having vaccinated just 6% overall.

By comparison, nearly three-quarters of wealthier countries had vaccinated 40% or more of their people.

Unicef, SIDA and the Bill & Melinda Gates said in a joint statement on Friday that the four-year commitment would help Unicef procure Covid-19 tests, treatments and vaccines, as well as mitigating the pandemic's disruption of routine immunisation.

The financing will be effective through 2025.

Financing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been made available through a $2.5 billion Strategic Investment fund, which issued its first $15-million guarantee to Unicef in 2015 to prevent vaccine stockouts in Nigeria. It has since extended its commitment.

It increased its guarantee to $65 million in 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

"Many low- and middle-income countries rely on Unicef's procurement services to secure access to a wide array of affordable essential health supplies as part of their emergency response and to meet routine needs," said the statement.

"With the Covid-19 pandemic putting decades of work to improve child survival in jeopardy, this new financing will help improve the sustainable and reliable availability of essential and often lifesaving health supplies, such as diagnostics, syringes, and oxygen concentrators." It did not name which countries would be prioritised.

Unicef previously announced a pooled fund aimed at securing equitable access to Covid-19 medical supplies, including vaccines, which has since April 2020 aimed to secure $1 billion for immunisation and $1 billion for testing supplies.

The organisation has sped up the procurement and delivery of $900 million worth of supplies, including 840 million doses of vaccines to more than 100 countries, by leveraging financial guarantees, it said.

SIDA is Sweden's government agency for development cooperation. Cecilia Scharp, its director of International Organisations and Policy Support, noted that health systems in lower- and middle-income countries have been hit harder by the pandemic and supporting them is essential to limiting the global impact of Covid-19.

It substantially expanded its financing capacity in 2020 to support the procurement of Covid-19 products and other essentials. 

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