Health supply chains are the backbone of health systems. They ensure the right health products reach the right place in the right condition at the right time. Strong supply chains are critical to achieving our ambitious health goals, including eliminating AIDS, TB and malaria, ending childhood vaccine-preventable deaths, and ensuring access to reproductive health services. An efficient supply chain also safeguards donors’ and country governments’ financial investments in health products.
Yet in developing countries, supply chains are often sub-optimal and ineffective in supporting these broader health goals due to a combination of failures at various points along the supply chain. Improving supply chains and addressing roadblocks to access could save up to 6 million lives and contribute to further reductions in deaths of women and young children. And cutting down on inefficiencies in supply chains could save millions of dollars per year.
Ensuring Effective Health Supply Chains: A Grand Challenge for Development
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation issued a joint call for innovative and transformative solutions that can overcome key roadblocks and build more effective supply chains in low- and middle-income countries around the world. We seek solutions that are daring in premise and different from the approaches currently used. The ideas must be translatable to practical interventions accessible in resource-limited settings and have the potential to be scaled up or reproduced in multiple settings.
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