The International Vaccine Institute (IVI) has exchanged a trilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Kenya-AIST Council.

Under the MOU, the three institutions will seek cooperation in areas such as vaccine research and development through global joint funding, support for student education and exchange, collaboration with international research institutions on clinical studies, recruitment of faculty at Kenya-AIST, support for curriculum development, and global healthcare initiatives. This MOU is a follow-up measure to the agreement signed between KAIST and IVI in November 2023.

Kenya-AIST is the first higher educational institution to be set up abroad that benchmarks KAIST of Korea. With the feasibility study completed in 2014-15, the Kenya-AIST project commenced campus construction in 2019, nearing completion this year. It will start as a graduate school, offering advanced academic programmes in mechanical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering, ICT engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, and agricultural biotechnology. 

The three-way partnership comes at a time when IVI is pushing to open the IVI Africa Regional Office in Rwanda and its first country office in Africa in Kenya, which will also serve as the office for the ‘Advancing Vaccine End-to-end Capabilities in Africa’ (AVEC Africa) initiative. AVEC Africa seeks to build capacity and sustainability of the African vaccine ecosystem, including manufacturing, by implementing end-to-end research and development projects across Africa. To this end, IVI is closely collaborating with Africa CDC’s Partnerships for African Vaccine Manufacturing (PAVM) programme, which aims to manufacture 60 percent of the continent’s vaccine needs locally by 2040.