Global Citizens, you helped make it happen!

For the past year, you’ve been helping us campaign towards a bold pledge to assure every child in the world receives life-saving vaccinations. Through your petition signatures, actions around the Global Citizen Festival and advocacy, you’ve joined a movement of global citizens alongside Canadian NGOs, working to see real action from the Canadian Government.

Be proud that through your support, Canada heard you and this morning announced a $500M commitment to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

These funds will help Gavi in its work to vaccinate 300 million additional kids by the year 2020. That would save 5-6 million lives, almost doubling the 6 million lives Gavi has saved since its inception in 2000. Part of the reason why Gavi is so effective at saving lives is that it’s virtually revolutionized the economics of vaccines — using public-private partnerships to drive down the price of vaccines, building scalable supply chains and ensuring stable long-term funding that allows for better planning.

We applaud Canada’s government for the bold move and continue to urge countries like the UK, Australia & the US to follow with bold pledges and help Gavi achieve it’s global target of $7.5 billion over 5 years .

Canada has been a Gavi donor country since 2002, directly contributing $236 million GAVI commitments to date. Today’s $500 million announcement is a huge step forward towards ensuring that every child is immunized— a key step towards building a world where every child can survive and thrive. 

That’s something we can all get behind.