MTN’s US$25 million donation to support the African Union’s COVID-19 vaccination programme is on track to administer 165,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s Covishield vaccine to health workers in Ghana.
The vaccines arrived in the country two days ago and were received at the Kotoka International Airport by Matthew Kyeremeh, the chairman of the Health Commodities Group for COVID-19 at the Ministry of Health.
Mr Kyeremeh expressed his gratitude to MTN and said the vaccines will be administered to people with underlying conditions and frontline health workers.
Target: frontline workers
In a significant boost to the continent’s health, MTN made the commitment in January 2021 to accelerate the AU’s critical care programme. This aims to secure up to seven million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine overall, to be spread across all 55 AU member states, for health-care workers specifically.
“While the facilitation of the vaccination programme is in the hands of the Africa CDC [Centres for Disease Control] and the African Union Vaccination Acquisition Task Team (AVATT), MTN is encouraged to see a clear plan and strong, accelerated move towards keeping Africa and its people safe and healthy,” said Selorm Adadevoh, chief executive officer of MTN Ghana.
“This is part of our ongoing commitment to ensure that Ghana and Africa as a whole, is not left behind,” he said.
“As a company that is committed to the prosperity and progress of Ghana and indeed the continent, for MTN’s part, we are proud to be able to make a humble contribution to the millions of vaccine doses needed to reach herd immunity,” Adadevoh said.
Accelerated programme
Responding to the gesture by MTN, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, the Minister of Health, said: “We are excited and grateful to be receiving this share of the first one million doses as part of the AU’s accelerated vaccine programme, supported by MTN.
“While we are still in the early stages of the vaccine race, this initial contribution offers some very welcome relief as we start seeing the programme coming to fruition to the benefit of our dedicated health-care workers.”
Call for joint effort
MTN continues to call on all large corporates across all areas of industry to play a part by contributing to this and similar initiatives which can fast-track the rollout of much-needed vaccines to help get the coronavirus under control.
Following the outbreak of COVID-19 in Ghana, the MTN Ghana Foundation has supported Ghanaians with major interventions to lessen the impact of the pandemic.
The company donated GHC5 million worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) to the National COVID Trust Fund. It also donated essential equipment to the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research to enable rapid testing and data processing.
The foundation also donated over 80,00 face masks to 30 hospitals across Ghana.
With the surge in COVID-19 cases in 2021, the foundation recently donated PPE to 15 senior high schools and 29 hospitals. MTN Ghana also zero-rated several public websites providing health and other COVID-19 related information as well as over 200 websites for academic use by public and private educational institutions.
Other educational campaigns such as the “BE WISE” campaign and MTN’s global #WearItForMe marketing initiative were undertaken to build awareness around the importance of wearing face masks correctly to combat the spread of the virus.
As of the end of December 2020, the cumulative value of MTN Ghana’s efforts to fighting COVID-19 was GHC139 million.
Asaase Radio 99.5 – tune in or log on to broadcasts online
Follow us on Twitter: @asaaseradio995
#asaaseradio #TVOL
