Mastercard is a technology company in the global payments industry committed to leading the way toward a World Beyond Cash™. Mastercard is also a business-to-business firm, providing franchise, technology and advisory services to commercial, non-profit and public sector customers that then go on to serve their clients. This approach to the last-mile experience allows for the creation of nuanced, localised solutions targeted at the end user. Mastercard has made a bold commitment to financial inclusion – to reach 500 million people previously excluded from financial services by 2020, including 40 million merchants. In making this promise, Mastercard highlighted the importance of public-private partnerships. While ambitious, this goal is not out of scope of the company’s activities. Mastercard has launched large-scale projects in more than 50 countries, bringing more than 300 million previously excluded consumers and merchants into the formal economy in just the last few years. Mastercard brings its expertise in digital infrastructure, data analytics, innovation practices and sustainable business models, specialising in extending the reach of existing infrastructure through innovative solutions, linking disparate partners and systems. To succeed, solutions must be tailored to the context; they should utilise existing elements of the payments infrastructure and build new services that involve players like development organisations, humanitarian organisations and governments.

Under the banner of “efficiently delivering vaccines to millions of children, tracking identity and immunisation records in a digitised manner and incentivising the delivery of vaccines”, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance  leading partner and catalyst, and Mastercard acting in the capacity of technology partner, have embarked in a public-private partnership aiming at deploying the Mastercard Wellness Pass for interested Gavi-eligible countries on December 2018. The Wellness Pass is an interoperable and offline portable health care credential – accessible within a trusted network – that creates continuity of care by allowing a patient’s medical data to be stored offline and travel with them on their Mastercard Wellness Pass chip card. Every patient receives this from participating health facilities when they get their first vaccine or health service. For vaccinators and health workers, the Wellness Pass ensures that the vaccination records are available at any time through participating health facilities, regardless of connectivity, and utilises tokenised biometrics when accepted, or alternatively a pin, to verify service delivery and adhere to vaccination cycles.

In November 2021, Mastercard, Gavi and the Ministry of Health of Mauritania signed a framework agreement, and on Friday, 17 December 2021, the first pilot of the Wellness Pass project was officially launched. More than 35,000 Mauritanian mother-child pairs have been registered on the Wellness Pass since. The second pilot, the Ethiopia Wellness Pass project, was signed and launched on 17 June 2022. The Ethiopia Wellness Pass project proposes an upgraded version that will help address some of Ethiopia’s biggest challenges regarding pastoral, climate change-affected (cyclones, floods, etc.) and conflict areas’ populations. The latter can find themselves on the run overnight, without any vaccination history record, or as was recently the case for Mozambique, lose all the health info available if previously registered in one of the ravaged community health facilities. The revised Wellness Pass solution no longer offers the Electronic Immunisation Register (EIR) ; it uses DHIS2, the world’s largest health management information system, and complements the existing digital ecosystem with secure, portable and offline data storage, including biometrically derived identity tokens for easy identification and retrieval of vaccination history.

With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mastercard committed up to US$ 25 million in 2020 to catalyse the initial work of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) accelerator. In June 2021, on the occasion of the Gavi COVAX AMC Summit, Mastercard committed US$ 25 million to Gavi to support the core work of COVAX, including US$ 10 million to help deploy and deliver vaccines to lower-income countries, including remote and marginalised communities, through the Mastercard Wellness Pass. Mastercard has also established a global fundraising campaign, connecting with customers and cardholders in an effort to raise money for Gavi of more than US$ 3 million.

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