2020 marked the 20^th year in which VillageReach has been operating in Africa – and it was by far the toughest they ever faced.

The non-profit organisation – launched in Mozambique in the year 2000 to improve healthcare supply chains in the country, and has since spread into the Democratic republic of Congo and Malawi – had to contend with meeting its annual goals amid a raging COVID-19 pandemic that threatened to lay all the organisation’s plans askew.

Forget Cyclone Idai. Even with all the untold death and desolation it visited on the people of Mozambique – and VillageReach lived though it all with the people as it led part of the recovery efforts – at then people could still travel with no restrictions and the atmosphere was less deadly.

By then, Coronavirus had not yet announced itself to humans and change the world as we knew it.

But the men and women working at VillageReach just took the hits on the chin and stayed on their mission to deliver health care supplies to people who needed them in remote parts of the countries they operate in.

In the past year, the organisation’s projects – which include Chipatala Cha Pa Foni (CCPF, where VillageReach call centres disseminated health information to people and answered their questions), Last Mile Supply Chain and the Drone for Health – were instrumental in 46million people accessing quality health care across sub-Saharan Africa.

The projects also had a direct bearing in helping about 250,000 health care workers do their job in a safe and effective way, as well as availing medical supplies to 2,000 health centres in the region.

“To stop the tide of COVID-19, we knew we had to carry on in our mission to strengthen and accelerate responsive health systems,” wrote Emily Bancroft, the VillageReach president in her introductory message to the organisation’s 2020 annual report, which was released last night. “Our twenty years of work in strengthening supply chains paid off as we were able to effectively continue routine medicine and vaccine deliveries, use those same supply chains to distribute PPE to CHWs and advance our Drones for Health efforts in remote areas.

“In fact, the Last Mile Supply Chain program in Mozambique expanded from three provinces to eight provinces, covering more than 75 percent of the country’s health facilities, where it distributes essential medicines and vaccines directly to health workers.”

In 2015, VillageReach launched the Drones for Health – a programme which aims to increase equitable access to health products and diagnostics for people in hard-to-reach areas in Malawi, Mozambique and the DRC via drone technology – to add to its repertoire of responsive supply chain solutions, so the drones could leap-frog ground transportation barriers.

Thus far the programme, which has been conducted in partnership with Australian medical drone logistics company Swoop Aero – has been a roaring success.

“In Malawi, VillageReach and Swoop Aero will scale up the first national two-way drone delivery service in the world, expanding drone delivery from 25 to over 105 health facilities. Drones will also deliver medical products and pick up lab samples for testing for proper disease surveillance, contributing to a reduction in maternal and childhood disease as well as infectious diseases such as malaria, HIV, tuberculosis and COVID-19,” the organisation announced last month.

“In Mozambique, Drones for Health will enable the daily pick-up of COVID-19 and other lab samples from rural hospitals in five hard-to-reach districts in Inhambane Province. The drones will supply life-saving products, including the COVID-19 vaccine when available.”

But in no country has the programme been more popular than the DRC, where the government went to the extent of commissioning regular medical drone deliveries in the Equateur Province, in North Western DRC. Located deep in the country’s tropical rainforest, medical supply chains in Equateur had been dependent on boats along the Congo River or adjacent waterways, which have not always been reliable.

But following a string of pilot tests last December, the DRC Ministry of Health commissioned VillageReach and Swoop Aero to start drone their fleet on regular delivery patrols to 70 hard-to-reach health facilities covering 22,000 square kilometres and serving over half a million people in the region.

The drone program will also help to monitor diseases such as polio, measles, yellow fever, HIV, and tuberculosis, and potentially COVID-19.

The drones also helped deliver personal protective equipment (PPE) to community health workers at the height of the pandemic, which helped their latter in safely carrying out their duties in the communities they work in.

“As PPE became scarce around the world, VillageReach joined the COVID-19 Action Fund for Africa (CAF-Africa) and worked with the DRC government’s COVID-19 Response Committee to quantify the PPE needs for community health workers, and plan for its arrival and distribution to the last mile.

“Once received, warehouse workers had to be trained to safely unpack the PPE at the national warehouse and then repack in smaller containers for transport to provincial warehouses and individual health facilities.

“In Equateur province, one of the hardest to reach provinces in DRC, PPE was flown in via VillageReach’s Drones for Health program. When PPE reached community health workers in Kinshasa province, it was used to protect workers as they vaccinated children against polio across 35 health districts. Armed with PPE, CHWs vaccinated over one million children in Kinshasa.”

Actually, in its annual report, the organisation celebrated the success of its Last Mile Supply Chain (LMSC) program, which they said was one of the high points of their year, as it helped them overcome travel problems brought by the pandemic. In achieving this, the drones worked well with other means of transport, an actually saw real expansion in Mozambique where the organisation started 2020 serving only three provinces, but had stretched that to eight out of eleven provinces by the end of the year.

“This incredible growth would not have happened without the strong, collaborative partnership of VillageReach, the Mozambique Ministry of Health, USAID and private sector partners Bolloré and Agility,” said VillageReach in its report. “LMSC’s trusted partnerships allowed the government to be confident in its ability to get products to people across the country during a pandemic.

“During 2020, LMSC’s growth was something to celebrate. It delivered health products to over 800 health facilities, 500 more than it did in 2019. Even with the constraints of COVID-19, LMSC was able to ensure uninterrupted deliveries of essential medicines and vaccines, which meant more health workers had the lifesaving supplies for patient care.

In addition to LMSC’s geographic expansion it also seamlessly integrated the transport of donated personal protective equipment into routine deliveries, allowing health workers to stay safe while treating their patients during a pandemic.”

The organisation’s drone programmes in Malawi and Mozambique are desperately short on funding though, and last month, VillageReach and California-based philanthropy organisation, Focusing Philanthropy started a fundraising campaign to raise $2million to keep the Drones for Health programme in the air.