Jack Ma Foundation has donated its third of medical supplies to Africa on Monday 27th April in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia courtesy of Ethiopia’s national carrier Ethiopian Airlines.
The Jack Ma Foundation’s donation includes 4.6 million masks, 500,000 swabs, and test kits, 300 ventilators, 200,000 sets of protective gear, 200,000 face shields, 2,000 temperature guns, 100 body temperature scanners, and 500,000 pairs of gloves.
This is the third round of donations from the Jack Ma Foundation which has supplied COVID-19 essentials to 54 African countries in a bid to help fight the pandemic. The first donation was made in March and included 5.4 million face masks, kits for 1.08 million detection tests, 40,000 sets of protective clothing, and 60,000 sets of protective face shields.
Apart from the donations, on 28th April, The Jack Ma Foundation co-hosted with the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) a special webinar entitled “Global MediXChange for Combatting COVID-19 (GMCC): The Experience of China”, which brought together over 2,700 among medical experts from Africa, China and other parts of the world, enabling them to share knowledge, experience and best practices for treating COVID-19.
According to Jack Ma, founder of the Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Group during the webinar, “Over the past 3 months, I have spent each and every day following the pandemic. And during our donation efforts, we realized that not only medical supplies are needed, but also frontline experience to fight the virus. That is why we established the GMCC. Solidarity and collaboration are the only way we can succeed. The solution is not isolation, but instead cooperation.”
The session also included presentations by Dr John Nkengasong, Director, Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC); Dr Chen Wang, President, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences; Dr Bin Cao, President, China-Japan Friendship Hospital; and Dr Raji Tajudeen, Head of the Division of Public Health Institutes and Research at Africa CDC.
Dr John Nkengasong, Director, Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) noted: “Partnership is key to winning the war against COVID-19. In our strategy we have highlighted four things: cooperation, collaboration, coordination and communication. If we do not want Africa to be the next epicentre, we must foster multisectoral partnerships at the community level, at the national level, at the continental level, and at the global level. This important collaboration is a major milestone in achieving this.”
The Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Foundation launched the GMCC last month to facilitate open knowledge sharing and online communication to combat COVID-19.
Supported by technologies and tools from Alibaba Health and Alibaba Cloud, GMCC features three main components: digital access to epidemic prevention resources, videos and webinars, and tools for online discussions. Nearly 3000 medical professionals have already joined the platform globally and thousands of medical staff from hospitals across Ethiopia, Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa and Zimbabwe have participated in live exchange sessions organized by the GMCC to better understand how to respond to this new virus disease pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed 1,423 lives and there are 31,933 cases as of early Tuesday, April 28th.
The second donation from the Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Foundation was made on April 6 to all 54 countries in Africa.