With peer support from AFRIMETS, a newly equipped temperature laboratory now calibrates the data loggers that guard vaccine storage across the country.
Vaccines are only effective when they are kept within a narrow temperature range from factory to clinic. The data loggers that monitor refrigerators and transport boxes must themselves be calibrated, and until 2025 that service was not available in the country.
AFRIMETS matched the institute with an experienced peer laboratory, which advised on equipment, procedures and the estimation of uncertainty for comparison baths and reference thermometers. Staff completed a placement at the peer laboratory before the service was opened.
Every calibrated logger is a refrigerator we can trust. This service matters to every child in the immunisation programme.
The temperature laboratory now calibrates several hundred data loggers a year for the national immunisation programme, hospitals and pharmaceutical distributors, replacing calibrations that were previously sent abroad at considerable cost and delay.
The institute is preparing the service for assessment against international requirements, with the measurement capability to be submitted for regional review.