A Zimbabwean tech start-up, Vaxiglobal, was recently named among the first winners of the Kofi Annan Award for Innovation in Africa which attracted 330 applicants from 38 countries across the continent, NewZimbabwe.com reports.
The other two winners of the award which comes with an endowment of 250 000 Euros (US$250 000) for each of the three winners, were from Kenya and Nigeria.
Vaxiglobal was co-founded by Dr Integrity Mchechesi, a medical doctor and public healthcare innovator together with a physiotherapist and public health expert Tsitsi Eunice Sifiyali.
The winners were announced Monday in Austria at the Austrian Academy of Sciences by Chancellery Minister Karoline Edtstadler and Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg.
Vaxiglobal uses contactless biometrics to minimise waste of immunisation resources, improve data quality with open standards and enable the scale-up of immunisation campaigns in African countries.
The company’s solution uses a mobile phone to scan patients’ faces and create digital certificates in a cloud.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company worked with laboratories, airlines and technology companies to build up a safe and approved digital verification system for travellers’ immunisation. Said Dr Mchechesi back in 2020:
It’s often impossible for busy border authorities to verify the names of doctors, and the supposed location where vaccinations occurred, by phone or email.
After vaccination, the laboratories create a digital record in our system. The traveller gets a QR code on a mobile app or on paper, which is instantly verified by the border authorities, who can see where they got the vaccine and who gave it to them, as well as the batch number of the vaccine, which protects the authenticity of each and every vaccine.
Currently, some 320 000 people are registered and during the COVID 19 pandemic, the company verified 1.1 million vaccine doses in a pilot project.
Since its inception in 2019, Vaxiglobal has built relationships with the ministries of health of Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The prize is named after Kofi Atta Annan (1938-2018), a Ghanaian diplomat, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former United Nations Secretary-General.