In the recent past, the global health sector applied technology in health commodity supply chains.
Despite its widespread use in western-world, not many African countries have embraced it.
In developing countries, particularly African countries where the disease is prone, the health supply chain functions poorly in a high prevalence of substandard, stock-outs, and falsified medications.
The reason for the poor functionality of the health supply chain in LMICs is a result of their complexity in nature.
Unlike in developed countries where health supply chains are managed almost entirely by the private sector, in LMICs, public, private, and non-governmental organizations coexist as channels used to distribute medicine with various interconnected flows between the three channels. The African governments have varying health models, and Central Medical Store (CMS) operates alongside other donor-established vertical supply chains. These tend to overlap and cause a lot of complexities that generate inefficiencies and ineffective monitoring processes. These inefficiencies weaken the supply chains and lead to corruption, product diversion, and theft of medicines in cases where different hands handle it on the path between a CMS and a local health center.
Thus, these problems tend to escalate the stock-outs in developing countries and raise the use of substandard medicines entering the health system as wrongdoers try to cover their activities.
Thanks to the global health initiative that has taken to account these concerns. Efforts have intensified to improve health supply chain management in developing countries.
The global health community has worked to expand the operation of traceability in developing counties’ health systems by encouraging the use of GS1 standards by their suppliers and working with their governments to establish the foundation required for adopting serialization.
The work done so far is noticeable by USAID is taking the lead to work with governments such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Uganda, Tanzania, and Pakistan.
Advocacy efforts that have made a huge difference have transpired and trickled the interest of most developing country governments in traceability technologies. During the first African GS1 healthcare conference held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia May 2018, the idea was displayed and graced by representatives from 38 counties, 45 regulatory bodies, and 23 Humanitarian organizations.
After all that, one would ask whether these developing countries took any steps to implement traceability technology.
Yes, indeed! Ethiopia’s Pharmaceuticals Fund and Supply Agency (PFSA)- a division of the Federal Ministry of health-with support from USAID, successfully piloted the GS1 barcode technology to enhance their health commodity supply chain.
Utilizing GTINs that include serialization gave PFSA the ability to track and trace the distribution of each medical product down to the individual package. This degree of traceability can assist in many critical ways, from implementing policies and recalls to reducing the counterfeiting of medical products.