Canada and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance

Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance is a health partnership that provides immunizations to the world’s poorest people. Created in 2000, Gavi works with public and private partners to provide new and underused vaccines to children living in the world’s poorest countries.

Gavi supports vaccines that immunize children against pneumonia, diarrhea and meningitis, some of the world’s leading killers of children.

To date, Gavi has immunized more than 640 million children and saved an estimated 9 million lives. Yet, approximately 1.5 million children die from vaccine-preventable illness every year and 19 million infants are still not able to access life-saving vaccines.

Effective investment in global health

Immunization is one of the most cost effective investments in global health. Gavi’s work aligns with Canada’s focus on the health and rights of women and children.

Canada is a long term partner of Gavi and we have been a member of the Gavi Board since its creation.

Board seats are held by:

• donors
• recipient countries
• vaccine manufacturers
• civil society organizations
• research and technical institutions
• independent technical experts
• Gavi Alliance partners: UNICEF, the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Canada’s support for Gavi

To date, Canada has provided more than 1 billion in funding to Gavi.

Our work with Gavi focuses on:

• immunizing 62 million children in 2016, often with more than one Gavi-supported vaccine
• in the 2016-2020 period, Gavi is on track to help countries immunize 300 million children, saving an estimated 9 million lives
• supporting Gavi’s INFUSE (Innovation for Uptake, Scale and Equity in Immunization) Initiative to address gaps in immunization coverage and equity. This includes gender barriers in the Francophone countries of Africa that have some of the lowest immunization rates in the world
• supporting Gavi’s Advance Market Commitment (AMC), which has increased availability of the pneumococcal vaccine to reach over 76 million children in 57 countries

Achievements

As of 2016, with the help of Canada and other donors, Gavi has achieved the following results:

• preventing more than 9 million deaths through vaccines for pentavalent, pneumococcal, rotavirus, yellow fever, meningitis A, Multivalent meningitis, Japanese encephalitis, human papilloma virus, measles second dose, and measles-rubella, inactivated polio, and oral cholera
• immunizing 640 million children
• immunizing 40 million children against polio with the inactivated polio vaccine
• providing 1.1 million girls with HPV vaccines
• strengthening the health systems of more than 60 countries
• lowering the cost to fully immunize a child with pentavalent, pneumococcal and rotavirus from US$ 35 in 2010 to US $19 in 2016

Related link

• Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance
• Project profile — Advance Market Commitment for Pneumococcal Vaccines (II)
• Project profile — Support to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance – 2016-2020
• Project profile — INFUSE - Innovation for Uptake, Scale and Equity in Immunization in Francophone Africa