GAVI and its partners met in Stockholm to review their progress since June 2011. The meeting convened donor and implementing country representatives and Alliance partners including the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, civil society organisations and vaccine manufacturers. GAVI CEO Dr Seth Berkley presented “a detailed update on progress since the successful London pledging conference in June 2011. This success has been made possible through GAVI’s unique funding model which brings together donor funding, financial contributions from developing countries, and supply and price commitments from vaccine industry partners.” New pledges were announced including from Sweden, who in 2011 pledged US$40 million per year to GAVI to 2015, will now provide a total of US$129 million for 2013 and 2014, and from the Republic of Korea which announced a new commitment to GAVI of a total of US$5 million from 2013-2017.

GAVI said delegates also “engaged in detailed discussions around the challenges of maintaining vaccination programmes while also reaching the 22 million children who go unvaccinated each year.” The event closed with a Ministerial Conversation on Sustainable Funding which highlighted the opportunities and challenges of securing long-term, predictable funding to secure vaccination programmes. The European Commission also announced that it will host a high-level preparatory meeting for GAVI partners in early 2014 ahead of the Alliance’s next funding cycle.

More at: http://www.gavialliance.org/library/news/press-releases/2013/gavi-alliance-partners-reaching-more-children-than-ever-before-with-accelerated-access-to-vital-vaccines/#sthash.gNJsgkeG.dpuf

MSF made a series of recommendations to the GAVI Alliance and the Mid-Term Review meetings in four key areas “where changes at GAVI could make an important difference.” The recommendation includes “making GAVI prices available to humanitarian actors like MSF, further lowering vaccine prices for all in need, extending vaccination to children above one year of age, and incentivizing for development of vaccines that do not rely on cold-chain logistics.” MSF also released a series of videos that “summarize the views of key experts, stakeholders and influencers in the field of global immunization that met in Oslo in October 2013 to share ideas on how to overcome current barriers, and effectively reach out to the one in five children currently unprotected from killer diseases each year.” More here:

http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/press/release.cfm?id=7125&cat=press-release