Friday, 29 March, 2024
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MTN donates $25m to AU's health worker vaccine programme

Telecoms group MTN has donated $25m to the African Union's (AU's) vaccine programme to immunise health workers. Polity reports that this was announced by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa during the recent African COVID-19 Vaccine Financing and Deployment Strategy webinar.

"We call upon other companies, both of African origin and offshore companies that do business in Africa, to do what MTN has done to contribute financially to enable African countries to immunise their target groups," he said.

"It is against this background that we have convened this webinar to discuss the continent's state of readiness to deploy COVID-19 vaccines effectively," he added.

Ramaphosa said issues such as financing and streamlined regulatory processes, reliance mechanisms, logistics, human resources, governance, communication, community engagement strategies and a country's readiness needed to be examined. "We need to discuss innovative solutions to leverage different roll-out capacities, including opportunities for collaboration with a range of private sector role-players," he noted.

According to Polity, Ramaphosa said the purpose of the meeting was to identify the next steps to be taken in ensuring the rapid deployment of vaccines to eligible populations. "With the progress made towards the acquisition of vaccines for the continent, we look to this meeting to identify the next steps we should take to ensure the rapid deployment of vaccines to the eligible populations," he said.

He added that more countries would need to support this initiative, saying this would enable more countries to access active pharmaceutical ingredients and benefit from technology transfer, including the know-how to manufacture vaccines in Africa at a cheaper cost.

Also, Polity reports, Ramaphosa outlined that, together with India, South Africa has proposed a trade-related intellectual property rights (Trips) waiver in response to the pandemic. "We are calling on the World Trade Organisation to waive specific Trips obligations related to the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 for a defined period."

 

[link url="https://www.polity.org.za/article/mtn-donates-25m-to-the-au-vaccine-programme-for-health-workers-2021-01-28"]Full Polity report (Open access)[/link]

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