2025 in Review: Advancing One Health through Sustainable Cold-Chains and Vaccines
One Health is an integrated approach to optimise the health of people, animals, and ecosystems. As such, it requires collaboration across multiple sectors and disciplines to address complex, interdependent challenges, including the adequate provision of health related sustainable cold-chains. In 2025, the Clean Cooling Network’s One Health activities focused on the roll-out of training, consolidating our position in the global health community as a key player, and deepening collaboration amongst human health, veterinary, and policymaking practitioners.
Our “Cold-Chain for Global Health (CCGH)” course equips trainees with practical, systems-level skills to manage cold-chain challenges across human and animal health settings, In 2025, we launched the course and through engaging three 2025 cohorts we graduated 49 professionals from public health, veterinary services, laboratory systems, immunisation programmes, and other research institutions. Notably, the course averaged 300 applicants per offering, underscoring rapidly growing demand for applied One Health cold-chain training across Rwanda and Africa more broadly.
Beyond training, this year also saw us further establish our position in the scientific community, as well as with policymakers and industrial leaders, as a convener of regional and international stakeholders. We successfully organised and delivered the second annual One Health Vaccine Symposium, bringing together more than 200 participants from Rwanda, Africa and the UK. The 2-day event (plus one day field trip), was held on our Kigali campus of the Africa Centre for Sustainable Cooling and Cold-Chain (ACES), and focused on translations from research to implementation, It provided a platform for dialogue on vaccine development and deployment, cold-chain resilience, and pandemic preparedness across the human and animal health sectors. It also strengthened cross-country collaborations and reinforced the importance of integrated approaches to vaccine delivery and biosecurity.
Looking Ahead to 2026
In the coming year, we aim to build on this momentum by expanding One Health–oriented training, increasing regional reach, and deepening practical engagement with national programmes. Priorities include scaling the CCGH course, increasing the value of our alumni networks, and more directly linking training outcomes to implementation in immunisation, surveillance, and outbreak preparedness. Simultaneously, we will be strengthening food systems, health systems, and diagnostics infrastructure. We also plan to further position cold-chain systems as a core component of One Health resilience, supporting vaccines, diagnostics, and biological samples across human, animal, and environmental health domains, as well as a critical infrastructure essential to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).