Nigeria still has a long way to go when it comes to delivering healthcare to every one of its nearly 200million citizens.

But today the country gets points for making solid strides towards achieving this.

The Nigerian government, drone logistics company Zipline and medical supplies non-profit Gavi have launched an integrated care program designed to improve health outcomes for zero-dose and under-immunised children and their families.

Using Zipline’s drones to deliver the vaccines, the program aims to not only vaccinate hundreds of thousands of children over the next two years, but will also provide them and their families with treatment for severe acute malnutrition, deworming medication, vitamin A supplements, family planning services, and other vital primary care supplies.

“Gavi is focusing on innovative programs in Nigeria because more zero-dose children—about 2.25 million—live in Nigeria than in any other country in Africa,” the drone company said in a statement.

“These children and their families are more likely to face difficulty accessing education, clean water, sanitation, nutrition and healthcare. As a result, children who don’t receive any vaccines account for a third of all child deaths.

“Because zero-dose children are generally unreachable by routine immunization services, Gavi is leveraging Zipline drone delivery, which is an established means of transporting medical goods and supplies in certain states in Nigeria, to bring the vaccines to them.”

The drones are already on the ground, delivering medical supplies directly to staff at health centres and to trained Community Health Workers at delivery points near known clusters of zero-dose children, which Gavi and state partners have helped Zipline identify.

The initiative has helped immunise more than 16,000 zero-dose children in the first few months, provided nutritional supplementation to more than 9,000 children, and helped more than 1,500 new mothers access sexual and reproductive health services.

“We are deploying an extremely targeted response that we expect will significantly improve vaccination rates in parts of Nigeria over the next two years,” says Augustin Flory, Managing Director, Innovative Partnerships and Development Finance at Gavi.

“Our goal is to bring the type of impact we’ve seen through our partnership with Zipline in Ghana to communities in Nigeria who stand to benefit immediately from better access to care.”

The program is funded by Gavi and a collective of donors, including The UPS Foundation, The ELMA Foundation, IFPW and a number of high net-worth individuals. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the United Kingdom is also matching these contributions, which are now focused on scaling the platform to enable greater impact and cost-effectiveness in immunisation and primary health care delivery.

The partners will enable delivery of an estimated 2.3 million vaccine doses to fully immunise 121,000 zero-dose children, provide Vitamin A supplements and deworming pills to hundreds of thousands of children, treat more than two million cases of diarrhoea in children under five years old, and help nearly 120,000 new mothers access sexual and reproductive health services.

“Our partnership with Gavi and Zipline represents a significant milestone in health service delivery in the State,” says Dr. Vivien Mesembe Otu, Director General of the Cross River State Primary Health Care Development Agency.

“By applying Zipline’s agile supply chain to vaccination efforts, we’re able to establish far more local, convenient dosing sites, making vaccines and other needed care easier to access. We believe this approach has the potential to drastically reduce zero-dose prevalence and sustain those gains over the long-term.”

Zipline itself expressed excitement and being the drone partner in this project, saying the working model not only provides an opportunity to reach previously unreachable communities, but also the ability to foster and scale new models of sustainable development.

Zipline and local partners are working together to evaluate the impact of this model, with a view to launch it in other counties, if it proves to be high-impact and cost-effective.

The drone company started working with Gavi in Ghana, where they joined hands with the Ministry of Health to improve vaccination rates in Zipline-served areas by between thirteen and 37 percentage points across all vaccines in the routine immunisation schedule during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time that the World Health Organisation calls “the largest continued backslide in vaccinations in three decades.” 

A study conducted by Ghana Health Service and Zipline on the system’s cost-effectiveness for childhood immunisation shows that across more than 19 million vaccine doses delivered by Zipline, governments incurred a net cost of $0.66 per fully-immunised child, making Zipline more cost-effective than any other established immunisation intervention identified in peer-reviewed literature.

This announcement comes on the heels of the launch of the RTS,S malaria vaccine in Nigeria last week. The first batches were flown by drone in Bayelsa State, and Zipline has already delivered more than 2,000 doses, with plans afoot to integrate the deliveries into the new care program.