VaccineLedger

One in ten children still do not receive even a single dose of routine vaccine as per Gavi. This leads to a million deaths each year.

These children do not receive vaccines because two primary reason: Lack of availability of vaccines and lack of right incentives for the parents to get their children vaccinated. 

With availability, most health departments around the world lack tools that give them visibility into the supply chains that can help prevents issues such as stockouts, black marketing and detect cold-chain failures and expired products. 

When it comes to incentives, for a lot of low income parents it is diffiult to lose a day wage to get their children to the nearest immunization camp to get a vaccine.

Our blockchain powered mobile solution VaccineLedger solves both these problems above. It provides tagging, tracking and tracing of vaccines at various locations in the vaccine supply chains to improve visibility and prevents failures discussed above. This solution ensures that safe and high quality vaccines are always avialble in all immunization locations. 

On the other hand, the app can be used to transfer incentive tokens to parents who get their children vaccinated. These tokens can make the parents eligible to access benefits such as loans, food, and education. These tokens are interoperable worldwide and also act has proof of vaccination.

Our solution assists vaccine suppliers, public and private health departments, and other key stakeholders to ensure quality and safety of the vaccines. 

UNICEF, Gavi who help distribute nearly 80% of global vaccines by volume have supported our solution since 2018. UNICEF Venture Fund invested in our startup twice so far and we have signed a Long Term Agreement(LTA) with UNICEF in September 2020. 

UNICEF Supply Division, which oversees procurement and distribution of vaccines worldwide benefits from using our solution to get continuous visibility and traceability of the vaccines at country, regional and PHC and CHC levels. The UNICEF country offices and Government Health Departments  also benefit as their suppliers who are upstream and their implementation partners downstream are all on one single decentralized app making it easy for them to collaborate. 

Apart from UNICEF, we are already working with Central and two Indian state governments(Telangana and Maharashtra) to improve vaccine supply visibility in India. Soon partnering with Inter-American Development Bank(IADB) for deployments in Latin America. 

UNICEF mentored to develop and deploy our solution. We completed many pilots in different countries to collect data and gather feedback from the immunization teams. We used this data and feedback to improve our product.

For the last few years, our team has been working with multiple Unicef country offices and several government depatments in India to deploy our solutions. Apart from mentorship from UNICEF, we have surrounded ourselves with key partners such as Inter-American Development Bank, IFC, India Health Fund, and many others who bring in a lot of expertise for us to scale. 

Our team collectively brings in tremendous domain and technology expertise that makes it easy for us to scale the solution. 

I belive Solve bring in the right ecosystem of partners and access for us to scale and amplify our impact. I am also excited about the potential opportunity to collobarte with other Solvers and participants

Incentives provided to people to get their children vaccinated are not innovative and very inefficient in many countries. For example, in most countries people get food grains as incentives. As the distribution is hard to verify most of the currupt suppliers and officials do not deliver these incentives. Also if parents are in desperate need of medicines giving them food grains doesn't help. These incentives are non interchageable. 

Tokenized incentives are globally verifiable and interchageable. A token can be used by parents to purchase or get access to a variety of useful resources. Blockchain technology allows that the incentive records are immutable and secure. Tokens also act as a more globally recognized vaccination record than the current [paper based vaccine cards. 

One out of 10 children do not get vaccinated leading to a million deaths that are vaccine preventable. We want to reduce this by 10% which will impact 20 million children globally. 

Number of vaccines prevented from failures

Number of Children fully vaccinated

number of children partially vaccinated 

number of children not vaccinated 

From the several pilots that we have completed in India, Costa Rica and other places we have been able to understand the problems more deeply. We asked questions such as why are children not getting vaccinated? Is it due to lack of access? lack of information, lack of interest or lack of trust? We soon learnt that all of these play a role in one in 10 children not getting vaccinated. However, the lack of access and lack of incentives are the two big factors in most geographies. We therefore designed a solution which solves both of these problems simultaneously. We did this by using digital IDs. We create a ID for a vaccine and ID for a child. We then defined success critiria as follows:

1. Each vaccine ID is delivered/linked to child ID. This means a vaccine has travelled across the supply chain and finally got delivered to a child. If a vaccine fails in between then this is considered as failure. 

2. Every child ID has collected/received all vaccines. We capture this by create a digital vaccination record for every child.  

This two step process ensure that we are capturing real time data on vaccine availability and immunization status of children. 

In 2018 when we visited different lower and middle income countries to understand the immunization programs and the problems around coverage, we soon relaized that there are huge gaps in data visibility in these supply chains. There are so many exisiting systems that operate in silos making it impossible for governments and organizations such as Unicef to run efficient immunization programs. That's where we relaized the power of blockchain to connect these siloed system to create a unifued view of the supply chain. the benefits of this continuous visibility are amaing! This visibility prevents failures such as stock-outs, cold-chain failures, re-routing and help more vaccines reach the children in need. The technology helps us go one step further by also enabling us to invcentive various stakeholders to do a good job. From incentiving the immunization officers, volunteers and parents there is more success in the immunization programs. Blockchain is a game changer in thuis space.

Our team is 40% women, 25% minority and spans across 3 continents. We have commited ourselves to diversity and have pledged to achieve the diversity goals by 2023. Our progress is monitored by Unicef Innovation Fund annualy.