Coca Cola partners with Health ministry in vaccination rollout

MBABANE – Other than serving the nation with soft drinks, Coca Cola Swaziland LTD is also in partnership with the Ministry of Health in the vaccination rollout exercise.

If you can find an icecold CocaCola almost anywhere in Africa, why not life-saving medicines?

That was the question posed by Melinda Gates in a 2010 TED Talk about new ways to distribute medicines to the most remote corners of the planet.

The local company was motivated by the question and decided to come up with an initiative to assist government through its Project Last Mile’s (PLM).

PLM’s Country Coordinator Khabonina Mabuza said the initiative came as a global partnership between The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), USAID, The Global Fund, The Coca-Cola Foundation and Coca-Cola Company.

She said the project started in Eswatini in 2017 as an initiative to assist in the fight against HIV/AIDS more especially among young girls and boys.

She said following the COVID-19 pandemic, they sat down with the ministry to see where they could help.

Vaccination

She said in Eswatini they were assisting government with a range of vaccination exercises from storage to transitioning of the vaccines until it reached the arm of every liSwati.

She said PLM reviewed 95 per cent of coldchain storage facilities in Eswatini, reducing the possibility of wasted vaccines.

She further mentioned that the USAID funding allowed PLM to use a local Coca-Cola system maintenance provider (responsible for keeping Coke cooling systems running) in Eswatini to conduct a national audit of the government’s cold-chain equipment, assessing what was missing and what needs to be repaired.

Mabuza explained that PLM was not working independently of the Ministry of Health.

She said they were also working closely with the Central Medical Stores and the Pharmaceutical Department.

She also added that since the vaccines were very delicate in terms of the storage, they needed to be handled with care even when being transported, so PLM assisted the ministry with distribution strategies during the transportation of the vaccines from one place to the next, PLM came through by providing cooler boxes which maintained the cold temperatures required and had the cooler box monitoring devices.

She went on to explain that since the country was now expecting the Pfizer vaccines which was even more sensitive than the Johnson and Johnson (J&J) and AstraZeneca vaccines that were currently administered in the country, what was required of Eswatini was to be in compliance to the COVAX facility storage requirements.

She lauded that the Ministry of Health for being able to procure refrigerators required to store Pfizer doses.

Assistance

Mabuza explained that the ministry was able to do this through the assistance of the Kirsh Foundation and that as PLM, they were engaged to programme those refrigerators to be ready whenever the Pfizer doses came through.

She explained that in one of their meetings with the COVAX facility, it was revealed that Eswatini was the only country that had an electricity back-up to make sure that the storages for Pfizer were going to function even during an electricity break down.

She emphasised that the Ministry of Health was making sure that the vaccines were safe and not compromised until they reached of those who were to be inoculated.

Director of Health Services in the Ministry of Health Dr Vusi Magagula said they have worked with PLM from HIV/AIDS initiatives till now in the fight against COVID19.

He said PLM was the birth child of Coca-Cola which is a big company, so they wanted to harness that into the health initiatives.