05.02.2025
Vaccine cooling – smart, solar and digital
Solar-powered refrigerators that store medicines reliably: mini transmitters report malfunctions directly to technical support, thus ensuring fast repair.
In Lulwe, a village in southern Malawi, Agnes Bauleni, director of the local health centre, takes an ampoule out of the solar-powered fridge. She explains: ‘We used to rely on an old gas-powered fridge. Fuel shortages often made storage unreliable.’ Since the centre switched to using a solar powered fridge, it has been able to refrigerate TB and COVID-19 vaccines and other medicines reliably and thus provide health care for more than 10,000 people.
On behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH also provides similar refrigeration chains in four other African countries. To date, 680 fridges and over 1,000 solar systems have been installed – with the help of digital solutions, too.
Clouds, live data and remote diagnosis
Veit Göhringer works in the project and explains: ‘Normally, checking that all solar systems and fridges have been correctly installed and are operational is a complex process.’ But this is now done digitally: technicians upload photos of the installed plant to a cloud; project staff monitor progress and the quality of the installation via an online platform.
Mobile radio transmitters on the fridges and solar systems also record their operation. In the event of a malfunction, they automatically send text messages and emails to local technicians. This swift data transmission means that technical problems can be remedied quickly and ensures that the electricity supply remains reliable. Göhringer: ‘Our digital approach has saved us a lot of time and money, and it can easily be transferred to other, larger fields.’
In addition to Malawi, GIZ is equipping health centres in Senegal, Ethiopia, Mali and Liberia with sustainable refrigeration chains. More than 1,200 centres now have the new equipment, which primarily benefits people in rural areas.