The Community Platform
ON THE N6 highway in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, towards the coastal city of East London, the flat dry expanse of the highveld begins to give way to rolling hills along the shoreline.
The second largest province in the country at over 65,000 square miles, it’s of a size that you can’t easily cover on four wheels.
Across an occasional bridge, far on the horizon, locomotives shimmer, chugging along into the rural landscapes, carrying goods and logistical services into some of South Africa’s remotest parts.
One such trainset, christened Transvaco, is a health innovation on rails.
At the time that FORBES AFRICA visited in October, it was parked in the East London central train station and providing a unique service – vaccination against Covid-19 to people who can’t otherwise access them.
“The Transvaco initiative allows us to offer vaccines to patients in rural areas who do not have easy access to healthcare facilities, like the hospitals or clinics,” says Dr Paballo Mokwana, Transvaco’s manager, to FORBES AFRICA. “We run on the railway lines, which makes it easier for patients to come through to us as opposed to going to a normal hospital.”
Mokwana, a physician who originally specialized in dentistry, has a passion for public health and has worked in the space
