Created in 1999 and formally launched in January 2000, Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, is an independent public-private partnership and multilateral funding mechanism that aims to “save lives and protect people’s health by increasing coverage and equitable and sustainable use of vaccines.”​ Gavi is the legal administrator for COVAX.

COVAX—the world’s largest program for the production and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines—was developed to respond to the need for equitable access to safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines.

The COVAX Advanced Market Commitment (AMC) mechanism provides COVID-19 vaccines free of charge for 92 of the world’s lowest-income countries. In addition, AMC countries can also use the COVAX Cost-Sharing Mechanism to order more doses using domestic resources or low-cost financing from their Multilateral Development Bank partners, enabling them to protect more people, more quickly.

COVAX aims to increase access and affordability of COVID-19 vaccines in eligible countries. To date, COVAX has helped to deliver some two billion doses of COVID-19 vaccinations to lower-income countries. COVAX was awarded the 2023 Grunin Prize by NYU Law School, which recognizes projects that demonstrate innovation, potential impact, replicability, and scalability.​

• Increased supply of vaccines to lower-middle-income countries
• Improved affordability of vaccines by providing a lower-cost procurement option for countries that are unable to secure reasonable bilateral deals
• Provided additional financing options to lower-middle-income countries by linking individual country vaccine demand to pooled procurement and Multilateral Development Bank financing 

The Guarantee facility was a unique investment for SEDF. Few other impact investors have the capacity to advance a guarantee of this scale on such concessionary terms.​ SEDF’s investment is one part of Open Society’s response to advancing vaccine justice.