Gavi

The impact achieved by Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance is staggering. Since 2000, it has helped vaccinate 822 million vulnerable children in lower-income countries, deliver more than 1.1 billion vaccinations through vaccination campaigns and prevent more than 14 million future deaths. And the impact is growing – in June 2020, Gavi and other partners launched COVAX, a global alliance whose goal is to ensure that people in all corners of the world get access to COVID-19 vaccines, regardless of their wealth.

The benefits of Gavi’s global immunisation programmes go beyond simply preventing deaths: healthy families have greater earning power, and in turn are able to contribute more to their communities and drive better standards of living for future generations.

To protect the next 300 million children, Gavi not only needs to understand which vaccines are needed where, but also the challenges and issues that may arise in delivering them.

“Rather than duplicate the services of the many players in the field of health and vaccines, Gavi relies on country-based systems and works with partners with widespread field presence to deliver its programmes.” shares Laura Boehner, Chief Technology & Knowledge Officer at Gavi,the Vaccine Alliance.

To continue with their ambitious goals, the management team at Gavi realised it needed to simplify interactions and processes with stakeholders such as donor governments, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank, the vaccine industry and, of course, the many countries whose immunisation programmes Gavi supports.

Managing such diverse relationships is complex and challenging, and Gavi needed to provide real-time insight into grant applications and renewals to enhance and simplify the process. Laura Boehner, explains “To modernise and improve that process, we initially digitalised steps requiring collected data from Gavi-supported countries. We moved this initial solution on the Salesforce platform to gain agility and accelerate the transformation. Now, many different stakeholders can work on the same platform and have visibility of the entire process in a single place”

In November 2015, Gavi built a country portal through which countries now apply for new vaccine support, report on the performance of vaccine programmes, and renew their full portfolio of support each year. Thanks to the Salesforce Platform and Experience Cloud for Nonprofits, Gavi can now provide countries with real-time access to their grant status, analyse successes and make data-driven decisions.

“The country portal has made these activities much easier and faster for countries than it had been previously. Countries are guided through a clear set of steps for each activity and they can see the history of what has been submitted to Gavi in the past.” says Laura Boehner.

Gavi has set the goal of improving grant application processing by 25% in the near future, permitting them to get life-saving vaccines to children faster.

To complement the country portal, they have also built a portal for partner organisations, like UNICEF and WHO, which receive Gavi funds to provide technical assistance. The partner portal makes it easy for partners to report on the progress and performance of their assistance to countries.

From application to vaccination

The Country Portal isn’t just a platform for Gavi staff and stakeholders to track their journeys; it also collects significant volumes of data, as is expected from the organisation responsible for vaccinating nearly 50% of the world’s children. Using Tableau CRM extensively for data analysis and resulting insights, Gavi is making data-driven decisions that support continuous improvement.

This cycle of continuous improvement means best practices can be shared across countries so Gavi can reach more children with greater efficiency.

These kinds of efficiencies are vital to helping the alliance keep its administration overheads really low; with overheads of just 4%, compared to an industry average of around 20%, Gavi is a best-practice example for the not-for-profit sector.

A healthier future

By making it easier to capture, collate and analyse information, Salesforce is bringing about a shift at Gavi, with the goal to further improve its efficiency and process visibility.

“For Gavi, data is not only an asset but also a key enabler for our mission to save lives and protect people’s health by increasing equitable and sustainable use of vaccines.” explains Laura Boehner.

Now, making data-driven decisions on vaccine implementation and roll-out programmes is the norm at Gavi. Leveraging data enables them to take a tailored approach based on each country’s specific nuances and challenges. Laura shares “For instance, our Country Programmes team can adjust the timeline and scope of vaccine distribution based on each country’s data assessments about on-the-ground supply chain, funding, or staffing issues that could prevent our vaccination objectives.”

Always striving for better, Gavi uses data to learn about their performance.

“Our vaccines programmes are monitored against key performance indicators that are defined by our strategy and approved by the Gavi Board. Indicators can be about people immunized, vaccine wastage, implementation timelines, spending and more. Understanding performance helps us finetune our approach with each country and maximize donation from donors.”

Add a pandemic to the mix

The COVAX Alliance was created in June 2020 to ensure fair and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines for all countries. COVAX will achieve this by supporting the research, development, and manufacturing of a wide range of COVID-19 vaccine candidates, and also negotiating pricing and distribution for the 190 countries that have joined the alliance to date.

Gavi is collaborating with Salesforce to help manage critical information to equitably distribute approximately two billion COVID-19 vaccines to 191 countries by the end of 2021.

In order to distribute vaccines at this scale and get vaccines to some of the world’s lowest-income countries, Gavi manages huge volumes of data and requires a single source of truth to help understand how many vaccines are needed and where. That’s where Salesforce comes in. Experience Cloud for Nonprofits and Nonprofit Cloud will power the country engagement platform to manage critical information.

These Salesforce solutions are enabling Gavi to move quickly with a single, secure portal that all participating countries can use to communicate and share information, such as vaccine requirements and access reports. Lower-income countries that are eligible for support by COVAX will use the portal to provide information to facilitate planning of doses to be rolled out. Higher-income, self-financing countries participating in COVAX will also use the portal to provide country demand and supply chain information.