- Gavi, MedAccess and the Open Society Foundations announce a new partnership to create an innovative Risk Sharing Facility to support the COVAX Cost-Sharing Mechanism
- The partnership aims to build on intensive efforts by Gavi to extend its suite of innovative financing instruments to help donors and countries stretch their available resources as the pandemic shifts and to protect against future shocks. The Facility’s instruments also represent a pathway and toolkit to address future global health crises.
MedAccess – a health focused social finance company founded by British International Investment – is partnering with the Open Society Foundations and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. The organisations are creating a risk sharing facility to help countries procure additional COVID-19 vaccine doses. The US$200 million facility is designed to enable countries to protect more of their people and support COVAX’s ambitions to make COVID vaccine procurement more sustainable and more tailored to country needs.
The Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment (Gavi COVAX AMC) provides COVID-19 vaccines free of charge for 92 of the world’s lowest-income countries, helping them to meet the objectives set out in their national vaccination strategies – with more than 1.2 billion doses already shipped to AMC countries. In addition, AMC countries can also use the COVAX Cost-Sharing Mechanism to order more doses using domestic resources or low-cost financing from their multilateral development bank (MDB) partners, enabling them to protect more people, more quickly.
“COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on health and financial systems in every country,” said MedAccess CEO Michael Anderson. “Donors have stepped up with huge sums of money to drive COVAX’s initial dose allocations but innovative finance can unlock even greater value. Our support for Gavi will enable COVAX to work with countries to speed up access to these essential vaccines and put their programmes on a more sustainable footing.”
