It all started with a plane, a cyclone and a desire to help people.
In 1999, Nelson Mandela and Graça Machel boarded a plane to Seattle. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Craig and Susan McCaw Foundation sponsored their trip on a “Building Bridges” tour to raise awareness and funding for Machel’s and Mandela’s respective foundations. At the time, Gates and McCaw ran a telecommunications company, and they sent one of their executives, Blaise Judja-Sato, to South Africa to accompany Machel and Mandela on the flight.
During the long flights between South Africa and the United States, Machel and Judja-Sato discovered a shared passion. Judja-Sato, born in Cameroon, expressed a desire to engage in more humanitarian relief efforts in Africa. So, Machel did not hesitate to call him when Tropical Cyclone Eline hit Mozambique in 2000, bringing weeks of rain and devastating floods. She was coordinating relief efforts through her foundation, the Foundation for Community Development (FDC), in Mozambique and asked if his company could provide satellite phones and other equipment.
Little did Judja-Sato know that by saying yes, he was about to change the trajectory of his life, eventually leading to increased access to quality health care for 111 million Africans by 2024.
Identifying the Problem
While in Mozambique, he saw infrastructure and supply chain challenges that ultimately blocked rural communities from goods and services, inspiring him to do more. In an interview with Newsweek in 2005, Judja-Sato said:
“I’ve never seen so much dignity and generosity. People who had lost their families and communities still wanted to share what they had. I knew then and there that I had to do more to help, not just during the floods. Even in normal life, they lacked the most basic necessities.”
Graca Machel’s influence was pivotal in founding VillageReach; her inspiration and mentorship were crucial. She once said, “It is only when you combine local knowledge, local systems and local reach with global knowledge and a global network, will that initiative get rooted and grow.”
When Judja-Sato returned to Seattle, he met with global health and supply chain experts. He made additional visits to Mozambique to meet with FDC staff and Machel, who, as the former Minister for Education and former first lady of Mozambique, had a wealth of information about community needs and working with the Mozambique government.
Through these consultations and research, it became clear that while significant public and private sector resources were providing new medicines, vaccines and medical equipment to under-reached communities, almost no attention was given to the significant infrastructure barriers that prevented those life-saving resources from reaching communities at the last mile. Therefore, VillageReach was established in 2000 to work directly with local leaders to address infrastructure barriers. Judja-Sato brought on Craig Nakagawa, Lionel Pierre and Didier Lavril, and together they decided to partner with FDC to strengthen vaccine delivery in Mozambique.
Big Goals; Big Results
Judja-Sato’s philosophy was that if you design for the lowest resource environments first, then you have a resilient model that can be adapted and scaled anywhere. They set their sights on vaccinating every child in Cabo Delgado province. To achieve this goal, VillageReach needed to work with the local community and the government to make an impact. In a formal agreement signed in 2002, the Mozambique Ministry of Health agreed to work with FDC and VillageReach to support vaccine distribution through supply chain innovation.
And it worked. After the first five years of implementation, vaccine coverage rates for children 24-35 months old increased from 68.9% to 95.4%, and reports of vaccine stockouts by rural health centers decreased from 80% to 1%. Over time, these supply chain improvements proved 17% more cost-effective for the Mozambique government.
VillageReach Today
Years later, VillageReach is still working in Mozambique, and its expertise in getting products to people has helped transform public health supply chains. This involves solving transportation and cold chain logistics issues, finding innovative solutions to address country-specific challenges and increasing data availability for supply chain decision-making.
VillageReach has expanded its programming across Africa in countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, Kenya and Tanzania. The work includes enhancing laboratory sample referral and transportation systems for epidemic-prone infectious diseases, establishing mobile health hotlines for reliable health information, training health workers and advocating for community health workers to become a formal part of public health systems. VillageReach is also using the deep expertise built through work in Africa in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, supporting local health and human services departments.
As VillageReach celebrates its 25th anniversary, it looks optimistically to the future, building on its legacy of bridging continents, transforming health care and improving lives. Amazing things can happen when like-minded people come together. Today, Graça Machel serves as the Honorary Board Chair at VillageReach, a testament to the enduring impact of her and Mandela’s vision.