A clinic with lights on at night
Eleven clinics in Karamoja kept losing vaccines to blackouts. The fix was solar panels, a fridge, and a stock list that phones ahead.
The arithmetic of a blackout is cruel in a vaccine fridge. Warmed and re-cooled vials may still look perfect, so nurses face a choice nobody should have to make: use doses you cannot trust, or turn mothers away. In Karamoja, eleven clinics faced that choice every rainy season, when the grid failed most.
The program's answer fits in two diagrams. The first is a solar array and refrigerator, sized for three cloudy days. The second is a stock list that pings the regional store when any item falls below three months of cover, so a delivery leaves before the shelf is empty rather than after.
“The refrigerator did more for trust in the clinic than any poster we ever printed.”
Sister Agnes Lokiru, a midwife at one of the eleven clinics, noticed the change in her register first. "Mothers stopped asking whether the vaccine was cold," she says. "They had watched us pour doses away. The refrigerator did more for trust in the clinic than any poster we ever printed."
The unglamorous line item is the motorbike courier. Stock moves between clinics and the regional store on a bike, twice a week, in heat that kills electronics and medicine alike. The courier costs less per year than one fridge; without him, three fridges are just furniture.
Four of the eleven clinics are now run entirely by district staff, and the handover target for the rest is 2027. The program's own audit lists what did not work — one array failed in year one because a supplier shipped the wrong charge controller — and what it cost to fix. Both are published.