Medicines, Medical Equipment & Supplies

Accordion Content

The Challenge

To help eliminate diseases, it often takes expensive and sophisticated medicine to help prevent and control diseases so that transmission can be stopped and the disease permanently wiped out. However, particularly for diseases that affect the poorest and most vulnerable populations in the world, these medicines are not easily accessible, and without a concerted effort and collaboration between many systems, they would never make it to these populations.

Our Approach

Because of the generosity of pharmaceutical companies, many neglected tropical disease (NTDs) elimination campaigns are made possible around the world. In our work to eliminate NTDs, we manage some of the largest and most complex of these drug donation programs, working with all points along the supply chain to ensure that medicines make it into mouths safely during mass drug administrations in endemic communities. Through expert committees (Trachoma Expert Committee and the Mectizan® Expert Committee), we help evaluate country applications for these medicines and then coordinate production with our pharmaceutical partners to ensure timely delivery without incident. We also develop sophisticated monitoring and evaluation systems such as the Zithromax® Shipment Tracker to ensure transparency in the supply chain.

Our expertise in managing drug donation programs has helped foster collaborative solutions to supply chain challenges facing the humanitarian sector. We participate in the NTD Supply Chain Forum, a unique public-private partnership that focuses on increasing efficiencies and lowering costs in the delivery of preventive chemotherapy medicines to more than 70 countries for the control and elimination of NTDs.