Zipline receives U.S. Secretary of State’s 2021 Award for Corporate Excellence from Secretary Blinken for work strengthening health security in Ghana
The last 20 months have shined a light on the importance of strong, resilient health systems; the systems that helped us identify COVID-19 in the first place, track its variants, develop vaccines in record time, and distribute them rapidly and equitably.
At Zipline, we’ve known the critical role instant logistics can play in strengthening health systems since our beginnings in 2016. And since 2019, we’ve partnered with the government of Ghana to serve health facilities nationwide, strengthening access to more than 200 critical medical products like vaccines, blood, and medications. To date, we’ve delivered millions of vaccine doses, including routine immunizations requiring sensitive cold-storage handling and hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 vaccines.
Zipline’s automated, on-demand delivery system provides reliable, efficient, and sustainable transportation infrastructure for critical medical products. In many cases, it also enables health facilities to gain access to supplies that otherwise would have been extremely inconvenient, costly, or even impossible to rapidly access and distribute.
Today, we’re honored to receive the Award for Corporate Excellence (ACE) in Health Security from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Recognized by U.S. Ambassador to Ghana Stephanie S. Sullivan, the award honors Zipline’s work in Ghana strengthening health security, access, and equity across the nation.
Secretary Blinken began his remarks at the Award for Corporate Excellence ceremony by defining corporate excellence as not only doing right by workers, the economy, and the planet, but also tackling our world’s most pressing challenges: “On every single issue, including ending COVID-19, including responding to the climate crisis, leading the global economic recovery, American businesses are critical partners, and when they put their expertise and resources to work finding and also scaling solutions, there is no test we can’t meet. ”
About Zipline, Secretary Blinken remarked: “Zipline, a company that I first became aware of about five or six years ago, is doing remarkable work, has partnered with the Ghanaian government to deliver more than 250,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses, and it’s able to do this getting to remote areas that otherwise would have great difficulty getting the vaccine or getting other medicines. These efforts are literally saving lives.”
Ambassador Sullivan described Zipline’s work as “a real game changer for Ghanaians” when presenting the award on December 8 in Accra. “Zipline’s logistics network made it a critical element of Ghana’s COVID-19 response. In the last two years, the company delivered over a quarter million COVID-19 vaccine doses, personal protective equipment, and COVID-19 test kits to remote locations throughout the country.”
We’re excited to build on and expand this successful partnership in Ghana to improve patient access and transform health supply chains. The launch of four new distribution centers in the coming weeks and months will enable Zipline to serve up to 24 million people — a full 90% of the country’s population.
Our work transforming health supply chains is also growing rapidly beyond Ghana and Rwanda over the coming year. In 2022, we’re working to launch our automated, on-demand delivery service in partnership with governments and public health champions in Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, and more. We are also poised to begin offering patient home delivery to certain communities — a service we recently launched worldwide in the United States in partnership with Walmart.
We were thrilled to share with Secretary Blinken our plans for this growth during his recent Africa tour. At the Innov8 Hub in Abuja, Nigeria, we spoke with him about Zipline’s work transforming health systems and strengthening health security, twin missions that have only become more apparent during the current pandemic.
The work in Ghana we’re being recognized for today, and the exciting work that we know is ahead across Ghana, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire and more, is all thanks to our talented team members. They are an extraordinary and passionate group of individuals from across Ghana who make our service to health systems and communities possible day in and day out, and provide the real power behind our operation. Onward!
