Green Vaccine Procurement: How multilateral organisations can prepare for sustainability

Vaccines are among the most powerful inventions in history, making once-feared diseases preventable,” declared Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), in April 2024. The latest figures reveal that vaccines have saved 154 million lives over the past 50 years.

At the same time, sustainability has risen dramatically on the sociopolitical agenda to become an undercurrent to all global development.

This report acknowledges the vital public health role of vaccines while considering their intersection with sustainability. Based on desk research, framework building and expert insights, it addresses what is being done to make vaccine development, procurement and delivery more sustainable.

Global and regional vaccine procurers, known as multilateral procurement organisations, such as the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), are asking what they can do to incentivise and shape sustainable vaccine procurement. With just these two organisations procuring 3.4 billion and 400 million vaccines each year, respectively, their activities can influence the wider vaccine industry. 

How vaccines can be sustainably developed, procured and delivered is also being explored by manufacturers.