Faith based organizations provide 20 – 30% of the health care in the East African Community. Their medicine needs are met, among others, by at least four church owned pharmaceutical supply agencies in the region: MEDS (Kenya), MEMS (Tanzania), BUFMAR (Rwanda) and Joint Medical Store (Uganda). If these supply agencies were to consolidate and coordinate their buying, they would represent a considerable market and benefit from economies of scale. 

The East African community is making progress towards establishing a common market and trade barriers were be dismantled on 1st July 2010 allowing free movement of goods and labour. Thus the prevailing environment also presents a great opportunity for the pharmaceutical supply agencies in the region and the church health sector in general.   

In October 2010, EPN invited executives from 6 faith-based pharmaceutical supply agencies to a meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The participating pharmaceutical agencies (DSOs) were Catholic Drug Centre and CHAG (Ghana), Mission for Essential Drugs and Supplies (Kenya), CHAN Medi-Pharm (Nigeria), Bureau des Formations Médicales Agréées du Rwanda, Mission for Essential Medical Supplies (Tanzania) and Joint Medical Store (Uganda). Also present were representatives from WHO, MSH and the AMFm Unit of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The objectives of the meeting were to: 

• explore areas of partnership
• share information on opportunities that exist of potential benefit
• share information on quality and sources of pharmaceutical product on the market
• establish pooled procurement as a specific area of collaboration, specifically:
  • discussing models of pooled procurement from around the world
  • identifying at least 2 products that all or some of the agencies could buy together
  • preparing a plan of action that ultimately results in collaborative buying 

After the 2-day meeting, the participants were able to commit to several priority areas for collaboration: supplier prequalification and pharmaceutical manufacturer audits, quality assurance of medicines, price negotiation, and institutional assessments on procurement capacities. They also agreed to share information in a wide range of areas related to medicines procurement. 

Click here to download the full report: Pooled procurement report (432.75 kB)

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