GAVI’s Data for Management Strategy
By Brian Taliesin, product and development packaging lead, the BID Initiative
Aug 26, 2014
Posted in Policies & Practices, Products
This summer Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance launched a set of supply chain initiatives that complement and support the work being done as part of the BID Initiative. Early this month, UNICEF hosted meetings at its New York offices as part of the Data for Management (D4M) initiative designed to support countries in the development of dashboards for key supply chain indicators. I had the pleasure of participating in the meetings and look forward to testing the concepts with the teams in Tanzania and Zambia over the coming weeks and gather additional input from the BID Learning Network.
Supply chain experts from WHO, UNICEF, GAVI, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, CHAI, JSI, VillageReach, and PATH attended to share current dashboard activities and build cross-organization coordination. Jan Grevendonk, WHO technical officer and BID Initiative advisory board member, opened the meeting with a document demonstrating that supply chain is one of the most under-invested parts of the immunization system. Unfortunately, immunization supply chain issues are limiting both routine immunization activities as well as new vaccine introductions, and the situation will only worsen over time. Over the next decade, the volume of vaccines is expected to grow four times, with an increasing number of doses, stock keeping units, and more expensive vaccines.
By the end of October, we will collect examples and input for dashboards to support:
- Stock management
- Cold chain management
- Distribution & transportation
- Data reporting
- Infrastructure & assets
- Demand planning & forecasting
Within each of these immunization supply chain domains, data visualization will be focused on increasing availability (such as reducing the stock-outs), potency (such as increasing the percentage of functional cold chain equipment), and efficiency (such as reducing the cost per dose delivered). These will be incorporated into a WHO draft guidance document to be shared in early November.
It is important to have strong country participation to ensure the dashboards are relevant and feasible. Your partnership is needed to prioritize what data will have the biggest impact; sequence what dashboards should be developed first; and increase the clarity through better data visualization. If you have examples to share or would like to be involved in developing the guidance document, please get in touch at btaliesin@path.org.