Saving Lives & Livelihoods: Four Areas of Focus

The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation through the Saving Lives and Livelihoods, aims to build on the tremendous and ongoing efforts of the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust (AVATT), COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX), World Health Organization (WHO), and governments to provide access to safe COVID-19 vaccines to the African population.

In support of this goal, the Mastercard Foundation is deploying $1.5 billion over the next three years in partnership with the Africa CDC as part of a bold new initiative aimed at Saving Lives and Livelihoods in Africa.

This initiative will acquire vaccines for at least 65 million people, support the delivery of vaccinations to millions more across Africa, and lay the groundwork for vaccine manufacturing in Africa through a focus on human capital development.

The initiative will strengthen the Africa CDC and support African Union (AU) Member States in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic through large-scale vaccination with safe and efficacious vaccines.

The initiative is anchored in AU efforts toward COVID-19 vaccine equity, with governance structures that emphasize the strengthening of national, regional, and continental institutions.

The Saving Lives and Livelihoods programme will be integrated into and support the delivery of routine immunization, ensuring the strengthening of public health systems in Africa.

This joint initiative will focus on four key areas:

1. Purchase of vaccines: The initiative will acquire safe and efficacious vaccines for more than 65 million people to help close the gap in vaccine inequity on the continent.
2. Deploy vaccines: The Africa CDC will consult Member States’ Ministries of Health and other relevant institutions. The initiative will identify and address needs for the successful distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. This includes the following:

• Procurement and transportation of vaccines, ancillaries, and other supplies as well as in-country logistics.
• Scale up COVID-19 Vaccination Centres (CVCs) and train the workforce to improve the speed and performance of vaccine deployment.
• Community engagement and communication to promote vaccinations and address vaccine hesitancy.
• Pharmacovigilance to monitor, evaluate, and manage adverse events.
• Genomic sequencing to identify potential variants.
• Technical assistance to national vaccination programs.

3. Expand vaccine manufacturing in Africa: The global pandemic has highlighted the critical need for Africa to produce critical pharmaceutical products – including vaccines – for its own health security. Enabling the continental manufacturing of vaccines will require a skilled workforce to drive, in the mid-term, critical areas such as process design, quality assurance (including the setup of quality management systems to achieve Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), and laboratory testing. In the longer term, this will be complemented by the skills necessary to drive Research and Development on the continent. The initiative will invest in developing the human capital to enable vaccine manufacturing in Africa.
4. Strengthen the Africa CDC: This initiative aims to bolster the Africa CDC’s capacity and resources to oversee a historic regional vaccination exercise, to prepare for future health crises, and to spearhead public health advancements across the continent.

Key Result Areas

The Initiative, through various implementing partners, extends support to the Africa Union Member States in the following areas.

1. Procurement and Logistics to Central medical warehouse:
2. Supply core vaccine units(vials)
3. Supply ancillary products for vaccines.
4. Coordinate overall supplier management.
5. Ensure required systems and tools for vaccine supply chain management are in place.

• In-country logistics:

1. Manage and monitor in-country logistics of vaccines and ancillaries.
2. Store, repackage and distribute vaccines and ancillary consumables.
3. Ensure required systems and tools for vaccine supply chain management are in place.

• Risk Communication and Community Engagement

1. Understand the drivers and scale of vaccine hesitancy and develop a strategy to combat it
2. Implement RCCE strategies across selected Member States
3. Set up systems and tools for effective communication.

• COVID-19 Vaccination Centres (CVCs)
  1. Set up new and expand existing CVCs.
  2. Hire, train and manage CVC staff to deploy or administer vaccines at the CVCs.
• Safety Surveillance:
• Set up a system for reporting adverse events following immunization (AEFI) in Member States
• Build investigation and analysis capabilities at national, regional, and continental levels.
• Establish a safety surveillance network.
• Genomic Sequencing:
  • Strengthen the existing laboratory and sample referral network.
  • Manage data and IT systems.
  • Conduct training.
  • Ensure overarching programmatic governance.
• Implementation Science:
• Conduct research on real-world vaccine effectiveness and public health impact.
• Identify and codify barriers and success factors for rapid immunization.

The above result areas are anchored on the direct support from the Africa CDC that includes:

• Technical assistance to Member States to ensure robust strategies and micro plans for successful implementation.
• Data and information systems in setting up an Information Technology (IT) function in Africa CDC to provide real-time data collection and reporting tools for the programme.
• Hiring of Programme staff to support the project implementation.

The Africa CDC will work with a range of implementing partners (multilateral actors and other local partners), bringing together their diverse strengths to achieve the joint objectives of this initiative.

For more information, please visit www.africacdc.org

Contact Us:

Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC)
Roosevelt Street W21 K19, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Email: africacdc@africa-union.org
www.africacdc.org