Against the backdrop of birds of paradise, the Congo River, and women dressed in colorful Liputa dresses, I arrived in Kinshasa well aware of a heartbreaking fact: that the Democratic Republic of Congo is among the top 10 countries with the most zero-dose children — children who have never received a single vaccine. In fact, the DRC is one of the hardest places to live in the world, with steep rates of malnutrition and 73% living in extreme poverty, making people all the more vulnerable to polio, measles, COVID-19, and other diseases.

My talks with families, health workers, and UN agencies in the DRC hammered home three key factors about what can’t be ignored in order to ensure good health and well-being for all.

In Kinshasa, a city whose population is more than double that of New York City, the impact of urbanization is visually obvious: Traffic is almost always congested along the main — and only — thoroughfare. Even in DRC’s capital, only the sturdiest vehicles are able to navigate the bumpy, unpaved roads to access local health clinics and to deliver lifesaving medical supplies.

Consequently, the roads often pose an ironic logistical roadblock: Vaccines rely on a continuous cold chain that has to run like clockwork. During our visit to the solar-powered Kinkole vaccine warehouse, which stocks more than 136 million doses of routine immunizations a year, the warehouse manager explained that once a cargo shipment of vaccines arrives at the airport, it must be immediately transported to one of Kinkole’s 12 temperature-controlled cold rooms. Then, when the vaccines are ready to be distributed, they are loaded onto refrigerated trucks or small planes and delivered to regional health clinics. Timing is key. All it takes is a traffic jam, inaccessible road, or unexpected fuel shortage for the vaccines to be delayed to their destination or get too warm in transit, thus becoming ineffective.

Read the full article about vaccination in the DRC by Alice Zhang at United Nations Foundation.