More Health in Vulnerable Communities

Jan-Cassen Kraus, supply chain manager for Animal Health at Boehringer Ingelheim, is tired. He has been sitting on an old motorbike for more than four hours. His joints hurt, his eyes are itchy from the dust of the road, and his forehead is burning because it has been exposed to the relentless sun of Ghana all day. Yet, he forgets his pain immediately once he looks at the smiling face of Kojo. The farmer, who is surrounded by his three young children, has been looking forward to Jan-Cassen’s arrival. Jan-Cassen provides him with the vaccines he needs for his goats, chicken, and cows. The animals are the main source of income for Kojo and his family. They sell their eggs, milk, and offspring. Therefore, their wellbeing is crucial.

The reason why Jan-Cassen is on a simple farm in Ghana can be traced back to 2019, when social entrepreneurs and start-up founders Peter Awin and Alima Bawa from Ghana reached out to Boehringer Ingelheim to pitch their business idea Cowtribe to the MMH business accelerator. This accelerator is a structured program which helps start-ups to evolve their business model with a mission to achieve long-term sustainable business models.

They are two of around 120 social entrepreneurs supported by MMH. The initiative plans to expand its reach further and partner with a total of 250 social entrepreneurs worldwide in the coming years. These collaborations are a key component of our work on sustainable communities and drive our aim to positively impact the lives of 50 million people around the world by 2030.

MMH provides support to vulnerable communities

Peter and Alima are a good example of how one generation can already make a great impact. Both Peter and Alima grew up in a remote rural region of Ghana. Every day, they saw families struggle to survive. When a family’s animals fell ill, it quickly resulted in extreme poverty. In the worst cases, family members even starved.

Peter and Alima identified two main problems, the first being that rural farmers had no access to vaccines, because they were only sold in big cities. Highways were nowhere to be found and the dirt roads were often flooded or riddled with huge potholes. It would take farmers days to get to a major city – with no one tending to their animals during their absence. The second issue: high vaccine prices, which meant that, even if they had been readily available, most farmers wouldn’t have been able to afford them.

A simple, yet effective idea

Peter and Alima received support through the MMH business accelerator, since Cowtribe entails a last mile logistics solution: Their simple, yet effective idea was that if you provide farmers with the vaccines and training on how to successfully raise healthy animals, they will be able to make a profit. In the long run, they can pay back what was invested in them, with interest. Cowtribe thus combines supply chain logistics with a strategy to make animal vaccines accessible and affordable to small hold farmers that live in remote rural areas. But more importantly, 34,000 farmers are now being provided with vaccines on a regular basis, enabling them to provide for themselves and their families.

Large-scale impact

In 2019, Jan-Cassen, who is an expert in successful supply chain improvement and management, was asked by colleagues from Making More Health if he would like to go to Ghana and help to set up the Cowtribe project. He took the opportunity gladly and set off to Ghana for three weeks. There, he and his colleague Moses Akoyo from Boehringer Ingelheim in Nigeria were confronted with a lot of challenges. They had to develop a concept for the organization of the supply chain from scratch, identify the farmers in need of support, and figure out how to reach villages without being able to rely on delivery trucks.

“Nevertheless, we were able to establish a working process,” Jan-Cassen says proudly. Documentation and process monitoring is now in place and running smoothly, farmers who need to receive vaccines have been identified, and supplying them has become easier. Cowtribe now simply delivers the vaccines by motorbike – an agile solution, enabled by an agile approach to challenge the status quo and the common assumptions on how a supply chain should operate.

Boehringer Ingelheim also serves as an important “door-opener”: Cowtribe has since established ties with Ghana’s Ministry of Food and Agriculture. In January 2020, they concluded an agreement to register livestock farmers across Ghana and tag their animals. This marks phase one of an initiative to implement a national vaccine subsidy program. Manuela Pastore, Global Head of Community Activation, is certain of one thing: “Our efforts are already proving to be successful and generations to come will reap the benefits.”