The 12th Global Health Supply Chain Summit (GHSCS) held on November 20th -22nd, 2019 in Johannesburg, South Africa. The summit focused on maximizing global health supply chain impact: (Data & Analytics, Entrepreneurship & Accessibility).
The summit assembled an impressive group of practitioners and experts from the global health supply chain field including academics, country planners, NGOs, logistics practitioners, pharmaceutical industry, and donor representatives.
Different panel sessions were held at the event where critical issues on how to improve the global health supply chain were raised and discussed.
Sproxil’s Managing Director for Africa, Chinedum Chijioke attended the event as a panelist in the Drug Quality, Substandard and Spurious Drugs session. During the session, the challenges of substandard drugs, counterfeits, parallel imports were discussed, and solutions proffered.
The panel focused on the African drug market which is projected to increase between 2013 and 2020 by 200%, and it is estimated that in 2020, the pharmaceutical market in Africa will reach a size of $45billion. According to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, it estimates that falsified or substandard malaria medication account for an additional 116,000 deaths each year. The cost of these fake drugs to patients and health ministries is about $38.5 million.
The drug quality problem has multiple dimensions including degraded drugs, accidental production errors, intentionally poor quality of drug by recognized manufacturers, or what looks like drugs but has no active ingredients, or those produced by unrecognized pharmaceutical companies. Each of these issues present different challenges and require different solutions.
In the opinion of the panelists, to ensure effective delivery of healthcare, it is crucial to develop policies that guarantee the quality of drugs that reach the African markets. In addition, visibility of the supply chain is critical and provision of the basic infrastructure at the rural level will ensure that drugs are preserved under the right conditions. The use of technology will play a key role in tracking and tracing drugs from production to the end user as well as addressing peculiar challenges of the African market.
