ARC Nigeria: Private sector collaboration will strengthen public health care
Experts in the private health sector are worried over the huge supply chain and logistics challenges and are offering opportunities for massive impact, saying that collaboration with other key stakeholders will strengthen public healthcare of the country.
Recent World Bank ranking shows Nigeria underperforms global and regional peers on key levers of logistics and supply chain efficiency.
Lagos State Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) transport and logistics survey conducted in 2014 showed that 25 percent of annual profit of industrial operators in Lagos State is lost to the clumsy transportation system.
More worrisome is the fact that studies confirm shortage of logistics staff and managers, however universities in Nigeria are not aligned well with industry or government needs in supply chain capacity.
To change the paradigm, Muntaqa Umar-Sadiq, CEO, Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria, speaking at the maiden ARC Partnership Forum revealed that the private sector has the expertise, resources, and capabilities that the public health sector can benefit from to increase availability of medicines and health commodities at the last mile by building efficient, effective and resilient supply chain systems.
“The impact ARC aims to achieve is an improved performance of the supply chains to increase availability of medicines health commodities at the last mile.
“Collectively, the private sector possesses both tangible and intangible assets that give it a distinct advantage in tackling specific health issues, including building efficient, effective and resilient supply chain systems,” Muntaqa explained.
ARC Nigeria, which is a collaboration of Private sector Health Alliance of Nigeria and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is calling on private sector collaboration in Nigeria to strengthen public health supply chain especially in availability of vaccines, essential medicines, and medical products.
Azuka Okeke, regional director, Africa resource centre for supply chain revealed that ARC Nigeria is currently working to build a centralised and regional supply chain resource centre that can provide independent advice, develop partnerships and share experiences and learnings across countries to help ministries of Health meet their public health goals.
“ARC is focusing on areas that collectively leverage supply chain expertise, tools and capabilities to support performance improvements in the public health system.
These areas include supporting supply chain strategy, advocate for supply chain investments and provide independent advice and expertise; support ministries of Health to shape investments and align donors and implementing partners, access private sector expertise, tools, methods and capability to improve supply chain transformations and supply chain management as well as broker partnerships to strengthen ministries of Health capability and build long-term talent for supply chain in Africa,” Azuka explained.
Jim Coughlan, global solutions director, UPS foundation, pointed out that the biggest opportunity is finding ways to engage the private sector given their knowledge level or intellectual capital in supply chain management.
“Supply chain leadership is a skill set that requires development. UPS and Global Alliance for Vaccine and Immunisation (GAVI) worked together on a program called Strategic Training for Executive Programme (STEP) which is currently running in Nigeria. That STEP program is about leadership in supply chain leadership. It also is a program for mentorship where organizations like UPS can be a part of the mentor program which stays engaged with the participants and shares that knowledge space.
“The STEP programme is based on a framework of professional competencies for supply chain managers. It brings in private sector innovation from logistics leader United Parcel Services (UPS) with the intent to help participants develop their problem-solving skills and foster effective team building approaches”, Coughlan explained.
The ARC Partnership forum brought together corporate private sector partners from pharmaceuticals, FMCGs, logistics and transport, telecommunications, etc. including government and development partners with an aim of sharing experiences, and exploring new ways of partnering with the public sector to achieve measurable results in healthcare. Also, the forum brought to the fore how private sector is strengthening public health supply chain.