Introduction

The UNICEF Venture Fund is proud to see portfolio member, StaTwig, graduate. They’ve come a long way – from numerous product iterations to deep diving into understanding their ecosystem better, strengthening their business model, and gearing up to take their solution to market. They’re now ready to collaborate at a larger scale – as they find new pathways to work with partners, investors, and the open source community.

Every year, vaccines prevent numerous diseases and save millions of lives. Yet,  one in five infants miss out on basic routine immunizations and as a result 1.5 million children die annually  from diseases that can be prevented.

High immunization coverage is especially difficult to achieve in rural areas where supply chain inefficiencies slow the rate at which vaccines can be delivered; the WHO estimates that nearly 50% of vaccines are at risk of being wasted globally each year due to logistics, temperature control and shipment related issues.

User testing

Over the past 12 months, our team was able to engage with a wide variety of users in order to gather design requirements and develop a user-centric product. We were able to validate our solution through several paid-pilots in India and the US.

After the UNICEF Innovation Fund blockchain cohort workshop in January 2019, we reached out to our existing clients and new ones. Using the human centered design approach that we learnt at the workshop, we conducted several weeks of research through interviews, field visits and external studies, using this research to draft the requirements for the product. 

Our team has grown in order to support these developments, we have hired three dedicated product managers who continue working with clients, updating requirements and adding new ones.  In addition, Statwig also onboarded two UX/UX team members who took extra care in designing a simple easy to adopt user interfaces for our applications.  We have and are continuing to ensure we hire with diversity to our growing team. This has really enhanced team dynamics and started showing enormous results.

Open Source

StaTwig has open sourced VaccineLedger, the supply chain management platform under MIT License in agreement with UNICEF Innovation Fund contract. This has strategically been a very good direction for the startup. Open Source also provides opportunity for a wider development community to participate in, enabling us to scale the platform rapidly and more sustainably. 

Piloting

As the supply chains are global, complex and fragmented, our pilots in response were large scale deployments -- involving several stakeholders in the supply chains with pilot durations lasting between  6-12 months. One such pilot was in Arunachal Pradesh, a far eastern state in India where we were able to track the delivery of vaccines from that state’s central warehouse in the capital city to Lohith district. Phase one of the pilot has received positive reviews from both the local state government and the operating partner Smart Village Movement initiated by UC Berkeley (Read more on coverage by The Better India ).

Open Source

StaTwig has open sourced VaccineLedger, the supply chain management platform under MIT License in agreement with UNICEF Innovation Fund contract. This has strategically been a very good direction for the startup. Open Source also provides opportunity for a wider development community to participate in, enabling us to scale the platform rapidly and more sustainably. 

Challenges

The biggest challenge has been the long sales cycles in vaccines -- thus, it is a longer timeframe to validate a new solution as a pilot usually takes 12-18 months. This has increased the costs and slowed down product development. 

To sustain, StaTwig has to focus on ensuring enough working capital through loans, venture capital investments or other channels to cope up with the slow moving industry. 

Next set of goals

To deploy the solutions in large scale environments directly and through channel partners to test the scalability of the solution, validate the value propositions and to improve the product quality.  In order to continue to grow our solution in the next year, our team is exploring ways to partner with innovative industry players such as zipline. 

In August 2019, we also got selected to the Gavi Infuse program. Gavi introduced us to various stakeholders in the vaccine supply chains including UNICEF, CHAI, NHM, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and several other critical stakeholders; we aim to continue to engage with programs such as the Gavi Infuse in order to take our solution to the scaling stage. 

Working with the UNICEF Innovation Fund

UNICEF Innovation Fund has played a key role in the success of StaTwig so far. The mentorship received through the Innovation Team and Jorge Fantin has been extremely valuable in identifying the right strategy for us. As our solutions are closely aligned with UNICEF’s supply chains we were able to build stronger partnerships with various UNICEF teams globally.