“Honestly, it was very exciting”: Gavi’s longest-serving staffer looks back to the very beginning
With Gavi shortly to release its Mid Term Review report, VaccinesWork is in a mood for reflection. We invited Corina Roberts, who joined Gavi in 2000, to sit down with us and take a look back across the decades.
- 12 June 2023
- 6 min read
- by Gavi Staff
When CEO Seth Berkley told Gavi's story in Geneva last month, he began his narrative in the dire immunisation landscape of the 1970s. "If you go back to the beginning, so, 1974, there was about 5% of coverage in the developing world," he said.
In the 1980s, the verve of UNICEF's visionary Executive Director, James P. Grant, fuelled a revolution – immunisation "took off" in poorer countries, and coverage rates soared. But by the early 1990s, that energy was flagging, and coverage rates were dropping again. In 2000, there was a manifest need for an institutional game-changer. "There were new and powerful new vaccines that weren't getting out," Berkley said. Enter Gavi.
The quintessential Gavi child is “every child… I mean, really, it’s my own child. Because that’s what makes you really feel what it must be like to lose a child.”
– Corina Roberts
Corina Roberts, Gavi's longest-serving team member, joins the story at approximately this juncture. For her, the institution's beginning is less vividly a moment than a place: a basement mailroom beneath UNICEF's Geneva offices, populated, at first, by just two or three people.
Roberts, who currently works as COO David Marlow's executive assistant, was one of them. An Argentina-born Scot, a multilingual graduate of secretarial college, and an alumnus, by then, of FAO, UNHCR and various philanthropic foundations, Roberts joined UNICEF's executive office staff in 1995. A few years after that, she went out for coffee with a colleague from HR and learned about "this new entity coming along," a public-private partnership for immunisation, then grafted onto UNICEF.
Soon, she was manning a desk in the mailroom office, part of the fledgling vaccine organisation, which by now boasted a burgeoning staff of "maybe five or six". Did it – the small team, the underground office – feel like more than just a literal step down? "Funnily enough, it could have… but no, somehow it didn't."
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If Gavi's inaugural premises were unglamorous, the new 'Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization' generated buzz from the start. "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were behind it," Roberts explains, "and there was a lot of funding.
"It was tremendous. Despite, obviously, a bit of concern from other players that Gavi might take over things," she recalls. "Honestly, it was very exciting." The small team was close-knit and energetic, fighting well above their weight class and landing, it seemed, major wins and big-name supporters. In cities and towns and villages far from Geneva, the work of protecting the world's children gathered pace. In 2001, Gavi had immunised three million children. By 2002, the number reached 17 million.
In 2023, that all-important statistic ticked up past the one billion mark. The number of antigens Gavi provides has, in the decades of Roberts's tenure, grown from six to 19. The size of the full-time staff around her now numbers in the hundreds. Needless to say, Gavi no longer fits in a basement.
In 2001, Gavi had immunised three million children. By 2002, the number reached 17 million. In 2023, that all-important statistic ticked up past the one billion mark. Needless to say, Gavi no longer fits in a basement.
"A few years ago," Roberts says, "Tore Godal [Gavi's first executive secretary] came back, and I went to meet him down in the GHC [the Global Health Campus in Geneva]. And he came in, and he sort of stood there and he said, 'My goodness, Corina, look at this! Do you remember when we were just in that small space in UNICEF?' And we both just sort of looked around and said, 'Gosh, it's quite something, isn't it?'"
You mentioned that when you joined Gavi, you didn't know much about global health. Was there a moment when the importance of Gavi's mission really hit home for you?
I think I understood the importance, but something changed for me once immunisation got onto the global health agenda. Because we mustn't forget, it wasn't there. Gavi helped, and other things helped too, of course, to put it on the G7 and G20 agenda.
And then, when you saw the amount of funding coming in — it was really unprecedented.
Working in the executive office, you're at the nerve centre of the Gavi secretariat, and you've been part of pulling together Gavi's contributions to major, high-level summits. That also means you naturally operate at quite a distance from the frontline work of immunisation – I'm thinking of community vaccinators and their vaccine-cooler bags. But you've also been out on field visits on several occasions and seen that work up close. What have you taken away from those trips?
Sometimes I've sort of felt: gosh, it really is difficult, you know? Sometimes we think you can throw a lot of money at things and they'll work, but I remember in the DRC, when we went there, and the big problem was the electricity supply to the cold chain. They had all the big fridges, et cetera, but everything was unplugged. You just saw how monumental the challenges were.
Responding to those kinds of challenges means that Gavi's role has evolved even as its impact has grown. Is there anything that stands out to you as an achievement to be proud of?
One of the recent things was when Anuradha [Gupta, former DCEO, and Roberts's erstwhile boss] coined the phrase "zero-dose children". Anuradha first presented the concept of zero-dose in Ottawa at the Board Retreat. I then watched her assiduously build support from all the immunisation stakeholders and get the Board to approve half a billion dollars of dedicated funding. Every time I see the term now, I think of Anuradha and her tireless work for these children.
Ahead of the Vaccine Impact Conference that's now ongoing in Spain, Gavi collaborated with 12 photographers in 12 countries to document what we're calling "Generation ImmUnity" – the billion-plus unique kids immunised by Gavi since 2000. Those photos are being exhibited in Geneva and Madrid. Over your years here, have you developed a mental image of the quintessential Gavi child? Has any one child stuck with you?
No, I don't think so, because I'm not sure that's right – it's every child. It's, I guess, the children I know. I mean, really, it's my own child. Because that's what makes you really feel what it must be like to lose a child.
After nearly a quarter century at Gavi, do you have a favourite jab?
All of the routine children's vaccines, but if I had to choose one, then HPV would be my choice, which my daughter was privileged enough to receive at 14 years old when it first came out in 2008 in Switzerland. That was a real achievement.
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