Partner coordination- DRC opportunity

Owned by Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Dec 14, 2020
3 min read

Participants: @Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed) @Satish Choudhury @Gaurav Bhattacharya (Unlicensed) @Brian Taliesin @Brandon Bowersox-Johnson @Christine Lenihan @Wesley Brown Not present: Freddy Nkosi (on travel)

Background: concurrent potential opportunities in the DRC:

  • 1) use of OpenLMIS COVID Edition for oxygen/eqpt mgmt

  • 2) OpenLMIS for labs

  • 3) UNICEF interest in a vaccine eLMIS

    • conversation with stewards

    • conversations with Villagereach

Rebecca & Brian spoke on Friday with UNICEF vaccines contact who is interested in moving the vaccine piece forward; starting with a 'scoping visit' (gather requirements and onboard stakeholders) by french speaker (ASAP). Deliverable for scoping mission: Requirements document; They want to take that document and have us to recommend a partner who can carry out the implementation. This will be a technical document and operational document that will recommend the implementation plan (training/deployment, etc.)

VillageReach DRC team is aware of UNICEF/Gavi interest in a vaccine eLMIS, and it looks like it’s turning into a real implementation fast! Our VillageReach DRC team is interested in proposing for and leading an OpenLMIS v3 implementation in DRC. We are glad to explore partnering on bids, and Freddy (DRC Country Director) would be a key contact along with Christine for exploring that. We also have DRC staff (who speak fluent French) who could participate in this scoping visit, as long as that does not prevent VillageReach from bidding on an eventual implementation. We also would want to be clear of whether the scoping team should focus on OpenLMIS or whether country stakeholders are asking for an independent voice to evaluate multiple tools.

Notes:

Goal for today: How do we respond to Unicef?

Gaurav: Recognize that VR has resources on the ground, CHAI does also. Do we do this jointly/independently?

CHAI could guide requirement gathering from a configuration perspective but detailed requirements gathering would require funding. High level requirement gathering might require some funding

Gaurav: Would Freddy and team have configuration requirements already?

VillageReach: Yes Freddy and team know a lot about how it works; from central level to last mile distribution

Not sure how much EPI/vaccines are involved with PNAM…

How many people do we have available to do this? (French speakers, local)

  • VR DRC office: has a new digital solutions staffperson named Musha; not sure what others

  • CHAI: Have staff on the ground; supported by Moses in line with how we did it in Cameroon

  • PATH: at least 2 people available

Brandon: Do we try to propose some kind of coordination mechanism to show for how this implementation can serve multiple country needs? each program can have their own configuration inside of. Brian: Sharing the on prem service costs or sharing the economy of scale

Brian: To help on the politics side, PATH is providing technical assistance to ANICIIS, and can help frame how this is introduced as part of the digital health architecture (even if vaccines is silo'd programmatically)

  • Christine/Freddy and Gaurav/CHAI will coordinate to confirm the resources

Next steps:

@Rebecca Alban (Unlicensed) ask Gibson the below list of follow-up questions

VillageReach, CHAI, and PATH to confirm who they have who can support with the scoping, and send that information to Rebecca to coordinate (including CV)

Follow-up questions for Rebecca to ask Gibson:

-Does the scoping rule you out from doing the implementation

-How will Unicef select the individuals who conduct the scoping work (should we submit individuals and CVs)?

  • Ask if they have coordinated with PNAM at all

-Propose this approach: What if they release a small amount of funding to do a preconfigured on-cloud deployment with configurations that mirror our existing understanding of the routine immunization and their current thinking on COVAX processes. Deploy quickly in the could as a test/demo version that could be used for training while we do a more detailed assessment on the ground of infrastructure requirements (local hosting to become a reality). Pre-configured version could be done within 3 months then they have something to go by re: whether they have what they want

-Brian: this would be a test/training environment to get them up and running; cloud OK for testing and configuration.

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