Resources

Many health facilities in remote areas operate without grid electricity, have unreliable electricity, or find that using electricity is too costly. In these settings, solar energy is a promising solution for powering the storage and transportation of vaccines and heat‐sensitive drugs at controlled temperatures. Project Optimize, a collaboration between the World Health Organization and PATH, has been working with public and private partners on several solar technologies tailored to the following local electrical power conditions: unavailable or unreliable power, intermittent power, and reliable power.

Project Optimize is collaborating with the Senegalese Ministry of Health to implement and validate a "moving warehouse" that will streamline the vaccine supply chain from the regional to the peripheral level. A moving warehouse is a truck composed of delivery teams that visit each health facility, check stock levels, and replenish stock as needed.

Keeping heat-sensitive vaccines and other drugs at the right temperature is crucial yet often difficult in areas with limited or no electrical power. In response to this challenge, a group of public- and private-sector partners is working with project Optimize to evaluate a range of transportation and storage containers for heat-sensitive drugs and vaccines that operate in environments with or without access to reliable power.

This document describes how project Optimize is collaborating with Vietnam’s National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology to demonstrate innovations in the supply chain that can help to meet the demands of an increasingly large and costly portfolio of vaccines.

This document describes how project Optimize and the Tunisian Ministry of Public Health are collaborating to explore new logistics and supply chain solutions that can optimize the vaccine supply chain.