African Health-Tech and Supply Chains: How Innovations Can Accelerate Health Access and Equity

On February 8, the Alliance and Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria brought together African health supply-chain innovators and global health stakeholders from multiple sectors to discuss how health supply chains are working to deliver equitable access to health in Africa. The dialogue was attended by 80 Alliance members and participants, including The Global Fund, Salient Advisory, Nivi, mPharma, Xetova, Chevron, JSI, Gilead, Stanford, BMGF, Vestergaard, Pathfinder, Americares, and Merck. The goal was to elevate the lessons learned from multi-stakeholder partnerships, especially from local innovators in Africa.

A number of challenges were identified, such as understanding unmet needs before developing solutions, harmonized and actionable data, surfacing data consumption at all levels, digital literacy and training, and financing. Opportunities for progress included grounding efforts in existing national government systems to ensure the greatest changes for scale, sustainability and equitable systems, driving a human-centered design approach to ensure innovations best serve the experiences of the people and communities we serve, and pooled and regionalized procurement. Friends of the Global Fight will take the lead in expanding on these findings for an insights report, anticipated for May.