Supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Immunization is not only one of the most valuable and cost-effective forms of public health intervention, but also it delivers positive health, social, and economic benefits. Vaccinations have been proven to improve physical development in children, create higher educational outcomes, reduce poverty and house spending, and enhance equity.

Despite the documented benefits of vaccines and immunization, global growth towards immunization continues to stagnate, and dangerous infectious diseases, such as malaria, take thousands of human lives worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, only in 2018, there were an estimated 405,000 deaths from malaria globally, compared with 416,000 estimated deaths in 2017, and 585,000 in 2010.

The most malaria cases in 2018 were attributed to the African Region (213 million, or 93%), which raises an important question: How can we empower caregivers in the most sensitive areas in order to leverage leverage the power of vaccination, decrease the mortality rate and improve access to quality diagnosis and treatment?

To help tackle this issue, we came up with the idea to launch a competition — ‘Seedstars Malaria and Vaccine Delivery Challenge’ — in the Africa region, aimed at identifying and supporting early-stage ventures that operate in the vaccine delivery and malaria supply chain across low-resource areas across the continent.

Using our proprietary 70K+ network in over 80 ecosystems, we sourced ventures based on the challenge criteria (geography, business stage, sector, keywords). In addition to sourcing, we fully managed the outreach campaign to invite target companies to participate in the competition. Finally, we screened 5K+ applications to shortlist the top companies, organize interviews and select the winners.

As a result of the screening and selection process, two ventures were selected for their profound work and impact in the healthcare sector: