Global Health Equity

As the world’s largest healthcare company, Johnson & Johnson has a unique ability to apply its expertise and convening power to advance progress on some of the most difficult global health challenges.

A project in sub-Saharan Africa is piloting the use of drones to reach remote islands in Lake Victoria, Uganda.

One of the biggest challenges we are committed to addressing is advancing global health equity. Put simply, health equity is the idea that there shouldn’t be such large differences in health outcomes between different places and people. Health equity would be achieved when there are no longer unfair, avoidable differences in health status among groups of people, when everyone can attain their full potential for health and wellbeing.

HIV treatment in the last mile

One of the ways we’re moving towards our goal of health equity is with our work in Africa in HIV prevention for women and girls. Currently, Girls aged 15–19 in sub-Saharan Africa contract HIV at a rate three times higher than boys the same age,² and 63% of all new HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa in 2020 were women and girls.¹

Many people worldwide still live beyond the reach of traditional healthcare systems and without access to care. Closing this “last mile” of health delivery and ensuring global, equitable access to modern HIV treatments is one of the most significant challenges in global health.

That’s why we funded a multi-year pilot study program with the Infectious Diseases Institute in Kampala, Uganda, to test the feasibility of delivering lifesaving HIV treatments quickly, efficiently and reliably to people using customized medical drones. The initiative is being trialled in the Kalangala District, which comprises 84 islands on Lake Victoria, only accessible by boat, often in adverse weather conditions. A setting which causes delays to deliveries and safety risks for health workers.

The first regularly scheduled medical drone flight took place in April 2021 and now the programme serves five landing sites across the region, reaching approximately 100 people living with HIV, with the potential to reach more than 1,000 if the project grows. The programme also offers an opportunity for researchers to quantify the effectiveness of medical drones' HIV drug delivery through a Randomized Control Trial that will help inform future efforts to scale drone technology to solve other last mile delivery challenges in Uganda and elsewhere.