Fifth GAVI Board Meeting, 21-22 June 2001, London, England

June 2001

Status report on the Fund

Discussion

It is essential to have a long-term perspective concerning the Vaccine Fund – beyond five years – so that resources are in place to help finance future vaccines, such as pneumococcal conjugate, as they become available.

We must continue to monitor the balance between funding for purchase of vaccines and health services infrastructure. As the Vaccine Fund receives new resources, the highest priority should be to increase support to immunization services in countries. One proposal is to provide countries with more than one year of share payments for each additional child reached; the Fund was requested to conduct further calculations to assess financial implications of this strategy.

Funding for vaccine research and development should come primarily from partners, but resources from a third sub-account of the Vaccine Fund may be appropriate to use to fill gaps, at some point in the future, in order to support the GAVI priority R&D projects (three vaccines and up to three technologies).

Board members emphasized the Fund policy not to replace, or displace, funding from other sources. In this regard, it will be useful to scale up activities on a database to analyse resource flows in immunization, as proposed by the Financing Task Force. This work should be linked to ongoing work being done at WHO and the World Bank on national health accounts.

The Fund was requested to present its fundraising targets and plans to the GAVI Board at its next meeting.

DECISIONS

The Board:

• approved a new Fund policy in which countries that receive* approval for support from either sub-account of the Vaccine Fund are eligible for three years’ supply of auto disable (AD) syringes and safety boxes for all traditional routine EPI vaccines, or the equivalent amount of money to be used to improve safety of immunization programs. Financial implications of this recommendation are estimated to be up to $17 million per year;
  
  
• approved a new Fund policy in which countries that receive* approval for introduction of new vaccines from the Vaccine Fund, but have >80% DTP3 coverage and are therefore not eligible to receive funding from the immunization services account, are provided a fixed amount of $100,000 to support costs associated with vaccine introduction activities. Financial implications of this recommendation would be approximately $2 million in total;
  
  
• approved a cap for funding support to the three big countries – China, India and Indonesia – of $40 million each (over five years).

* Decision is retroactive; countries that were approved in past rounds may request new support at the time of their inception reports.

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