Millions of children die every year from readily preventable diseases. Energize the Chain would like to use your towers to prevent many of those unnecessary deaths. How? In order to be effective, vaccines need to be kept cool, and using refrigerators powered and connected to monitoring systems by your cell towers would be a great way to complete the ‘cold chain.’ Econet is already saving children’s lives by doing this in Zimbabwe, and American Tower will add fridges to 85 cell sites in Ghana. This isn’t just a great corporate social responsibility and community relations opportunity for MNOs and towercos, it’s an ethical obligation for all tower owners to give this opportunity appropriate consideration.
One of the things of which I’m most proud is that four babies have been born to the TowerXchange team within the five years since I started the company, including my own son Joshua. To say we’re a family friendly company would be an understatement: our Team Strategic Retreats come complete with childcare and nappy bins!
So when ‘Energize the Chain’ approached us with a proposition to leverage the world’s 4mn cell towers, particularly the ~300,000 beyond the reach of the electricity grid, to enable the child vaccinations in developing markets, TowerXchange wanted to do all we could to help.
I’m a pragmatist at heart. With any innovation, no matter how it tears at the heart-strings, the first thing I ask is “how proven is this in the field?” So when we learned that Energize the Chain had already issued over half a million vaccines through 312 cell sites at which their refrigerators were co-located in Zimbabwe, and that similar solutions were being rolled out at 85 sites owned by American Tower in Ghana, we quickly realised this was something we wanted to advocate to all cell tower owners.
TowerXchange invited Energize the Chain Founder and Director Dr. Harvey Rubin to explain his proposition at the recent TowerXchange Meetup Asia in Singapore. Here’s some of the highlights of what he said.
“As many as three million children under the age of five die or get very sick every year from diseases that you can easily prevent by a vaccine,” Harvey told TowerXchange.
“When you’re trying to deliver vaccines for preventable child killer diseases like pneumococcal pneumonia, tetanus, measles, whooping cough, rotavirus, polio and diphtheria to remote villages beyond the reach of good grid power, one of the primary challenges is ‘completing the cold chain’ – keeping vaccines cool from the point of manufacture to the point where they’re administered to the child. Vaccines typically need to be stored within a 2-8°C range – exposure to higher or lower temperatures risks denaturing the vaccines, rendering them useless,” continued Harvey.
“The telecom and tower industry is solving a similar problem: providing reliable energy to connect communities beyond the reach of good grid power.”
“How about we work together to solve these parallel challenges?”
Harvey continued: “There are more mobile phones in the world than there are toothbrushes. There are more mobile phones in the world than there are toilet bowls. MNOs and towercos are expanding mobile phone coverage deeper and deeper into rural areas – often beyond the reach of the grid.”
“Ministries of Health around the world make the expansion of vaccines coverage a priority, often beyond the reach of the grid – there is an obvious opportunity to create a public private partnership between MNOs, towercos and Ministries of Health to co-locate vaccines refrigerators at cell towers.”
“TowerXchange readers will be familiar with the challenge of energy poverty around the world. More than 3.5bn people lack access to reliable electricity – that’s more than half the world’s population. There is no reliable grid power to power vaccines refrigeration in remote areas in developing markets. Your tower network infrastructure generates excess power, which can be diverted to help local communities. Energize the Chain, and our partners like USAID and GAVI, would like to work with you and your local Ministry of Health to co-locate vaccine fridges at some of your cell sites.”
Econet Wireless partners with Energize the Chain to provide more than 500,000 vaccine doses to children in Zimbabwe
In September 2010 Harvey and his colleague Alice Conant wrote a paper in the New Scientist suggesting co-locating vaccines refrigerators with cell towers in remote areas. Thanks to that paper, Energize the Chain was invited to give talks about this all over the world. Harvey gave one of these talks in Mombasa in Kenya, and sitting in the audience was one of the Senior Engineers of Econet Wireless, Bernard Fernandes, and he told Harvey: “This is something we can do. This is something we have to do. This is our Corporate Social Responsibility. We want to contribute to giving good healthcare to the people of Zimbabwe.”
In our industry, rightly so, we’re concerned about saving capex, saving opex, but isn’t it great saving lives too? Young lives - Bernard Fernandes, CTO, Econet Wireless Global
So Econet went out and did it. Econet’s Energize the Chain programme now has fridges at 312 sites all over Zimbabwe, and over two years they’ve provided more than 500,000 vaccines for the kids.
Energize the Chain exists to provide vaccines for the “fifth child”- referring to the one in five children in the world who live predominantly in remote regions and who do not receive adequate vaccinations and consequently either die or become severely ill.
Our primary goal is healthier children, however there is a tremendous ripple effect that can derive from our work at Energize the Chain. The savings from vaccinations amount to tens of billions of U.S. dollars. Ministries of Health can invest these savings into other areas of need, thus establishing a more robust overall healthcare system.
There is improved community health: vaccination programmes form the basis of village-operated primary health care activities providing the opportunity to deliver other primary care services.
Educational outcomes improve - healthy children have better school attendance and learn more effectively, increasing financial security and social and economic advancement.
Women are empowered - vaccination leads to a reduction of child mortality rates, resulting in families choosing to have fewer children.
In our business, we build the technical platforms that make an impact on people’s lives, because we believe that technology has to have a positive impact on people. So we believe in the human face of our technologies. One such face is Energize the Chain: the vaccine project – Douglas Mboweni, CEO, Econet Wireless Zimbabwe
Economic growth is promoted - healthier workers have better attendance rates, higher productivity, are more energetic, and mentally robust. The reduction in missed days at work particularly impacts women, who are often tasked with caring for sick children.
Vaccines promote equity - vaccine-preventable diseases disproportionately impact the disadvantaged.
Therefore, we at Energize the Chain firmly believe that in our collaboration with the MNOs and towercos we have a solution to a major problem that is scalable, sustainable, environmentally friendly with a powerful social and economic impact.
American Tower are saving children’s lives
The world’s largest independent tower company American Tower needs no introduction within the pages of this Journal. So when you learn that American Tower has partnered with Energize the Chain in Ghana, you can take that as an endorsement of this vision from the highest levels of the tower industry.
American Tower has been in Ghana since forming a joint venture towerco with anchor tenants MTN in 2010, and the company now operates over a third of the country’s ~6,000 cell sites.
American Tower, Energize the Chain and USAID collaborated to initially co-locate vaccine fridges at 30 remote cell sites in Volta, and in the Upper East and Upper West regions of Ghana – regions notoriously difficult to reach due to poor quality roads, and where keeping vaccines cool had been a real problem. The initial 30 sites will be followed by a further 55 sites.
Energize the Chain, and their partners Econet and American Tower, are saving children’s lives by co-locating vaccines fridges at almost 400 cell sites in Zimbabwe and Ghana. As an industry we could be ‘Energizing the Chain’ and immunising millions of kids from hundreds of thousands of cell sites. Let’s Energize the Chain all over sub-Saharan Africa. Let’s take this to India, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Pakistan and other countries in Asia where electrification, and immunisation, remain a challenge. This is a win-win for the tower industry: we save lives and we build closer relationships with our customers and communities. Please contact Harvey today and ask how YOU can help – Kieron Osmotherly, Founder and CEO, TowerXchange
What YOU should do next
Energize the Chain want to hear from MNOs and towercos with remote sites. Energize the Chain want to assess those sites, carefully build GIS maps of the cell towers and the health centres, and build models of how many miles it takes to deliver vaccines to the local communities, and then work out from which sites they can make the most impact.
Vaccines save lives. Energize the Chain can leverage your towers to keep vaccines cool and to save more lives. Your cell towers to save lives.
Please will you help Energize the Chain save hundreds of thousands of children’s lives?
For more information please visit the Energize the Chain webpage www.energizethechain.org or email Dr. Rubin at rubinh@upenn.edu
What Energize the Chain would like to do with your cell site
Energize the Chain would like to install a 0.43kW vaccine refrigerator, typically on a 2mx1.5mx0.4m plinth, in a shelter either inside or outside your cell site compound. This is not a cheap domestic fridge, but a purpose built piece of equipment costing over US$3,000. Access can be controlled by mechatronic locks such as those manufactured by Acsys, with door and temperature monitors installed by remote monitoring system market leaders.
Introducing Dr. Harvey Rubin, Founder and Director of Energize the Chain
Harvey is a Professor of Medicine with a secondary appointment as Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. The NIH, NSF, DARPA and the Global Alliance for TB Drug Discovery have funded his research in infectious diseases, resulting in more than 90 peer-reviewed papers. He served on national and international scientific review panels including the NIH, NSF, NASA Intelligent Systems Program, DARPA, and The Medical Research Council, South Africa. He was a member of the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity and the Dept. of Defense/National Academy of Sciences Biological Cooperative Threat Reduction Program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vGCS9n_Pjs
