Gates grants will help break roadblocks to vaccines

By Kyung M. Song
Seattle Times staff reporter

	VILLAGEREACH Blaise Judja-Sato founded VillageReach to help deliver medical supplies to hard-to-reach regions in developing countries.
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In many countries, poverty, bad roads and a lack of refrigeration frustrate attempts to move vaccines through that last mile.

Today, VillageReach, a small Seattle nonprofit group, announces it has received $3.3 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and $250,000 from the World Bank to expand its pilot project to improve deliveries of vaccines in Mozambique in southern Africa.

It's not a lot of money, compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars the Gates Foundation has given in the past year to help develop vaccines to combat such intractable diseases as tuberculosis, dengue fever and malaria.

But without reliable delivery systems, medical breakthroughs may never benefit large parts of the world.

"In many developing countries, critical health-care delivery systems are either broken or absent altogether," said Blaise Judja-Sato, president and founder of VillageReach.

The $3.3 million grant is the largest VillageReach has received from a single donor, and nearly double the $1.7 million it had raised since its founding in 2000.

VillageReach focuses on plugging a critical distribution gap: Poor nations often lack the infrastructure to move vaccines and medical supplies far beyond urban areas. That's a particular challenge with vaccines, which must be kept just above freezing during transit to preserve their potency.

The result is that millions of people who live in remote areas can't get low-cost immunizations even when vaccines may be plentiful.

The World Health Organization calls vaccines, along with clean water, the greatest developments to improve public health. The WHO estimates that 3 million people, most of them children in developing nations, die annually from vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and hepatitis B.

VillageReach, based in Fremont, takes an unusually integrated approach to ensure that vaccines cross the last mile, Judja-Sato said.
 
Four years ago, Judja-Sato left his job as director of business development at Teledesic, a Bellevue satellite company, to develop an entrepreneurial approach to health-care philanthropy.

Judja-Sato, a native of Cameroon on Central Africa's west coast, visited Mozambique in 2000 after devastating floods there. He came up with the idea for VillageReach after seeing how poor roads and other infrastructure failures prevented flood victims from receiving aid.

In the Third World, "it takes a long time to go short distances," Judja-Sato said.

In 2002, VillageReach began a pilot project in the Cabo Delgado region in northern Mozambique that now covers 42 clinics serving an area with 900,000 residents. It has been helping deliver vaccines for tuberculosis, polio, measles, mumps and rubella, hepatitis B, tetanus and diphtheria.

The strategy is to tackle all the logistical roadblocks that stand between the time that vaccines arrive in a country and the time remote villagers finally get inoculated.

In Cabo Delgado, VillageReach arranges for delivery trucks, hires people to fix breakdowns, and secures power and parts to ensure refrigeration of the vaccines.

VillageReach's model demands a cooperative host government: The group does not procure vaccines or most of the equipment itself. In Mozambique, VillageReach worked closely with the Ministry of Health, the provincial governor and other partners.

For instance, VillageReach, along with a local foundation in Mozambique, established a for-profit propane-gas company to provide power to operate refrigerators, lamps and sterilizers in rural health clinics, selling to both public and private customers.

In some parts of the world, up to one-fourth of vaccines are wasted because they freeze or get too warm, said Dr. David Fleming, director of the Gates Foundation's global-health-strategies program.

VillageReach is "one of the world's experts" on delivering critical supplies to difficult places, Fleming said. He added that VillageReach won the grant in part because the Gates Foundation supports "different and better ways to make things work."

Judja-Sato said only about 29 percent of the residents in Cabo Delgado were voluntarily immunized before VillageReach began working there.

Recent surveys in some districts in Cabo Delgado found that immunization rates have risen to about 40 percent.

The latest grants will help the nonprofit group expand its pilot project to cover 5 million people in Mozambique over the next five years, and to refine its model for use in other countries. Judja-Sato said his group needs to raise $2 million more to carry that out.

Kyung Song: 206-464-2423 or ksong@seattletimes.com

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