Gavi’s impact draws on the strengths of its core partners, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and plays a critical role in strengthening primary health care (PHC), bringing us closer to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of Universal Health Coverage (UHC), ensuring that no one is left behind.
Gavi also works with donors, including sovereign governments, private sector foundations and corporate partners; NGOs, advocacy groups, professional and community associations, faith-based organisations and academia; vaccine manufacturers, including those in emerging markets; research and technical health institutes; and implementing country governments.
Gavi now vaccinates almost half of the world’s children, giving it tremendous power to negotiate vaccines at prices that are affordable for the poorest countries and to remove the commercial risks that previously kept manufacturers from serving them.
Because of these market shaping efforts, the cost of fully immunising a child against 11 antigens now costs about US$ 28 in Gavi-supported countries, compared with approximately US$ 1,300 in the United States of America. The number of manufacturers supplying prequalified Gavi-supported vaccines has also grown, from 5 in 2001 to 18 in 2021 (with more than half based in Africa, Asia and Latin America).
Gavi shares the cost that implementing countries pay for vaccines, which has resulted in more than 521 vaccine introductions and campaigns, dramatically boosting immunisation against virulent diseases. For example, 3% of low-income countries had introduced nationally Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) vaccine that protects against diseases like pneumonia and meningitis. Today, Gavi has enabled all low-income countries to introduce this vaccine in their national programmes. Progress on the third dose of Hib vaccine coverage, as well as with pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV), has been so successful that the coverage rate in Gavi-supported countries is now higher than the global average coverage rate, for the second year in a row. By the end of 2019, 16 countries had transitioned out of Gavi support and are fully financing all vaccine programmes introduced with Gavi support.
