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June 2021
FEATURE
Project Last Mile Partnership Pivots to COVID-19
CII and the Office of HIV/AIDs (OHA) recently announced that USAID’s role in the Project Last Mile (PLM) partnership has been extended until 2026. PLM is a pioneering public-private partnership between USAID, The Coca-Cola Company and its Foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Global Fund, and PEPFAR that leverages the private sector expertise and business intelligence of the Coca-Cola system to improve access to life-saving medicines through supply chain and strategic marketing support throughout the African continent. PLM collaborates with regional Coca-Cola bottlers and suppliers to strengthen public health systems capacity by sharing the private sector expertise and network of the Coca-Cola System with Ministries of Health and partners through a co-creation process.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, PLM has pivoted to support Ministries of Health and partners with COVID-19 related programming. Support includes operational and strategic planning for vaccine roll-out, including route-to-market design for storage and transportation of vaccines for effective and efficient distribution; design and execution of preventive maintenance and repair models for cold chain; assessing the feasibility of leveraging the Coca-Cola System’s liquid CO2 for dry ice production and support of vaccines requiring ultra-cold chain; and, applying strategic marketing targeted at vaccine information. To date, PLM partners have supported work in Eswatini, Ghana, Lesotho, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda.
Digital Health
HBR Highlights how LMICs are Innovating to Combat COVID
CII’s Senior Digital Health Advisor Merrick Schaefer co-authored an article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) titled How Low and Middle-Income Countries Are Innovating to Combat Covid. Schaefer and his co-authors Ben Ramalingam, Benjamin Kumpf, and Rahul Malhotra, discuss various approaches and lessons learned, including ensuring that solutions are sensitive to social and cultural dynamics, and discovering novelty through permutations, substitutions, and combinations. The article showcases examples of innovations that originated in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), including Digital Health ones that USAID helped support, such as the enterprise approach the USAID mission in Ethiopia has taken across its supply chain and surveillance systems.
Innovation
Innovator Gradian Announces New Partnership in Nepal
Gradian Health Systems, a Saving Lives at Birth Grand Challenge winner, formed a new partnership with Nepal's National Innovation Center (NIC) and the America Nepal Medical Foundation (ANMF). Gradian produces both the Universal Anesthesia Machine (UAM) and the Comprehensive Care Ventilator (CCV), both of which can operate without reliable access to Oxygen and/or electricity. The new partnership will distribute 50 CCVs, training, and biomedical support to strengthen critical care services in nine hospitals, including Bir Hospital and Civil Hospital in Kathmandu. More details here.
Innovation
Innovator World Mosquito Program shown to reduce dengue by 77%
World Mosquito Program (WMP), a winner of the Zika Grand Challenge, just published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) demonstrating very promising results of a randomized control trial that drastically reduced dengue transmission. WMP is an international not-for-profit initiative that uses mosquitos infected with Wolbachia, a common bacteria, to block disease transmission by Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes, which carry dengue, Zika, Chikungunya, and yellow fever. The NEJM article showed that the release of Wolbachia-carrying mosquitoes in selected neighborhoods of the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta reduced dengue cases by 77% and dengue-related hospitalizations by 86%. Wolbachia also proved effective against all four dengue serotypes.
VIRTUAL EVENTS
July 1, 2021
Aspen Ideas Festival
Aspen Ideas
July 7, 2021
Accelerating Climate Science with AI
AI for Good
August 18, 2021
Digital Health and Data Science Innovation: Enabling New Models of Care Globally
Innovations in Healthcare
News
Science Magazine
Mixing COVID-19 vaccines appears to boost immune responses
June 9, 2021
Pacific Standard
How women provide an 'Invisible Subsidy' to the world’s healthcare systems
June 14, 2021
Science Daily
Developing countries pay steep economic and health costs because of high car air pollution
June 16, 2021
New York Times
Parents and caregivers reported mental health issues more often than others during the pandemic, a C.D.C. study says
June 17, 2021
CII NEWS
Harvard Business Review
How Low and Middle-Income Countries Are Innovating to Combat Covid
June 9, 2021
BBC
'Miraculous' mosquito hack cuts dengue by 77%
June 10, 2021
USAID
South Africa: Partnering for the Long Term Means Quick Action on COVID-19
June 24, 2021
What We're Reading
Rockwool Foundation:
Building Better Systems: A Green Paper on System Innovation
International Monetary Fund
Miles To Go: Emerging markets must balance overcoming the pandemic, returning to more normal policies, and rebuilding their economies
Bond
Racism, Power and Truth: Experiences of people of colour in development
Think Global Health
Preventing Pandemics and Ending Malaria Demand New Investments in Community Health
Funding/Recognition Opportunities
Blended Finance for Maternal, Child and Newborn Health in Bangladesh
Request for Proposals
Fund for Innovation in Development
Application Form
FT and IFC Transformational
Application Form
STAFF SPOTLIGHT
Dr. Data Santorino, Senior Lecturer Mbarara University of Science and Technology
At Mbarara University of Science and Technology (MUST), Data works as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Pediatrics and Child Health, the Director of CAMTech Uganda, and provides leadership at the MUST Medical Simulation Center. Data is the founding director of the Center for Innovation and Technology Transfer of MUST. MUST is the Africa home for the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech).
Data’s team has closely worked with the USAID Center for Innovation and Impact (CII) in the development, testing and scale planning for the Augmented Infant Resuscitator (AIR). The AIR device is a universal add-on device to existing resuscitation devices that provides instant feedback on quality of newborn ventilation.
Read Dr. Santorino's full interview here [PDF, 489K]
USAID's Center for Innovation and Impact (CII) takes a business-minded approach to fast-tracking the development, introduction and scale-up of health interventions that address the world's most important health challenges. CII invests seed capital in the most promising ideas and novel approaches, using forward-looking business practices to cut the time it takes to transform discoveries in the lab to impact on the ground.
Last updated: June 28, 2021
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