Such cold chain equipment, when available at the required cold chain points-in-country, will increase vaccine availability, potency, and safety. This will help to improve immunisation coverage. Some older technologies have high operating costs and/or poor temperature control that can lead to vaccine wastage if vaccines are exposed to very high or freezing temperatures. To support countries in improving their cold chains, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance established the Cold Chain Equipment Optimisation Platform (CCEOP) in January 2016.
Access the CCEOP Technology Guide (as of Feb. 2020)
The CCEOP is a financial facility through which Gavi jointly invests with countries in the purchase, deployment, and installation of higher-performing cold chain equipment.
GaneshAID provides experts to pre-Review the Gavi Cold Chain Equipment Optimization Platform (CCEOP) Applications from developing countries. Our experts are assigned to assess the quality and soundness of the country’s proposals to the Gavi CCEOP to ensure that applicants have fulfilled all Gavi requirements and received recommendations to take appropriate action -based on the “Pre-Review” assessment – in advance to the Independent Review Committee (IRC). There are Fifty-Five (55) Gavi-supported countries that are eligible for the CCEOP support. From 2016 to 2020, 19 countries were reviewed and received recommendations prior to the IRC.
The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all aspects of immunization programmes, including the supply chain. One of the measures to control the pandemic is vaccinating vulnerable people against COVID-19. Several COVID-19 vaccines are already available for deployment whilst others are in the advance phases of development and will be deployed as soon as they are approved by the market authorities. However, as many countries have only enough cold chain space to store their routine vaccine supply, additional cold chain capacity may be required to successfully manage the vaccine and implement vaccination campaigns.
Gavi has established a mechanism to support the Advance Market Commitment (AMC) Group participating countries to ensure successful COVAX deployment by addressing cold chain gaps. An Alliance pre-review process, jointly led by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) cold chain experts (hereby referred to as the “Alliance PR Team”), is necessary to ensure that country proposals satisfactorily meet the requirements set forth by the Gavi COVAX Facility and are therefore eligible for approval by Gavi’s Independent Review Committee. The pre-review activities are organized and coordinated by the WHO Secretariat, in collaboration with the Gavi Secretariat.
Our CEO joined the team of experts to pre-review the quality, exhaustivity and rationale of Countries’ application to the Gavi COVAX CCE facility.
| “I am so proud to support WHO and countries in this tremendous initiative. This will enable all countries to equitably access COVID-19 vaccines and address cold chain storage capacity gaps” |
Dorothy Leab, GaneshAID CEO
COVAX is the vaccines pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator. The ACT Accelerator is a ground-breaking global collaboration to accelerate the development, production, and equitable access to COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines.
Watch “COVAX: Ensuring global equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines”