CDI-MPHE Platform

Solution Name:

Connecting the Dots Initiative – Medical Products for Health Emergencies (CDI-MPHE) Platform.

Solution Summary:

 CDI-MPHE is an online platform bringing transparency to sourcing and procurement of quality-assured and affordable medical products for health emergencies.

• Thierry van Bastelaer, Ph.D.—Director of the Technical Program, United States Pharmacopeia (USP)

• Bankole Eniola, MBA, M.Sc.—Director for Technology & Product Innovation, Development Finance Summit, Africa (DFS)

Nearly half the population of Africa has no access to affordable quality essential medicines, resulting in limited ability to effectively prevent and address health emergencies, and leading to millions of avoidable disabilities and deaths. Citizens of the African continent—an estimated 85% of whom live under $5.5 per day—rely on poor quality medicines that do not treat disease and actually contribute to an increase in antimicrobial resistance.

The main cause of this situation lies in market
dynamics that prevent information on availability, price transparency and
optimization, which in turn hinders the aggregation of demand necessary to
provide medical products at optimized prices and lack of access during crisis.
More specifically, the Connecting the Dots Initiative – Medical Products for
Health Emergencies (CDI-MPHE) Platform will address the:

• Insufficient information for purchasers (medical products and pharmaceutical ingredients and quality, potential suppliers and adherence to good manufacturing practices);

• Lack of platforms to procure essential medicines for medical emergencies that are produced in Africa and are not tied to one particular donor or entity.

CDI-MPHE’s target audience includes four main groups:

• The platform’s ultimate beneficiaries are the approximately 800 million Africans who live in extreme poverty.

• Public sector buyers that procure medical products for health emergencies, strive to strengthen supply chain security and reduce procurement inefficiencies.

• Donor organizations that currently procure more than 60% of medicines and health products in Africa and which undertake tendering on their individual portals not fully leveraging the benefits of pooled procurement.

• Intermediate beneficiaries include manufacturers, regulators, and public health program managers.

As a team, USP and DFS Africa engage our target audiences through multiple strategic and tactical implementation partnerships: Federation of African Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, the African Union Development Agency-New Partnership for Africa’s Development (AUDA-NEPAD), National Regulatory Authorities and Ministries of Health in 18 African countries, WHO regional offices in Africa, regional economic communities (ECOWAS, EAC, IGAD), donors (USAID, GFATM, BMGF, AfDB). Our team continuously engages with these stakeholders through existing donor programs (USAID’s PQM+ Program implemented by USP), industry events, training programs, research, and partnerships

The most direct public good that USP and its partner DFS will deliver through the CDI-MPHE platform is access to reliable information on quality-assured medical products to mitigate the impact of health emergencies on the African continent. The procurement aspect of the platform will increase the availability and affordability of emergency medical products to last-mile customers, resulting in improvements in public health in low-income populations segments, where the expected changes are likely to have the largest relative impact.

Other public good will include, in time, the increased production capacity of African pharmaceutical manufacturers, as this will reduce the continent’s reliance on global supply chains of medical products for emergencies—as currently painfully exemplified by African countries’ very limited access to COVID-19 vaccine supplies.

Finally, the access to USP Documentary Standards will support increasing the quality of essential medicines on the continent, helping to counter the use on substandard and falsified medicines that many Africans have come to rely on.

By connecting local manufacturers and procurers in African countries via pooled procurement, the CDI-MPHE platform will ensure that products are more affordable than if procured through individual supply chains. Manufacturers will only have access to the CDI-MPHE marketplace if they meet the platform’s quality and supply chain resilience thresholds, thereby helping to ensure the consistent supply and quality of the products transacted. By providing subsidized technical resources on GMP to pre-screened manufacturers, the platform will offer a continuous incentive for manufacturers to improve their quality control systems. 

Logical links between activities, outputs, and outcomes:

Activities:

CDI-MPHE will:

1. Offer to pharmaceutical manufacturers subsidized USP Documentary Standards and GMP technical resources to increase the quality of manufacturing of medical products for emergencies. 

2. Pool together pre-screened manufacturers and purchasers in a virtual marketplace to help ensure availability and competitive pricing of medical products for emergencies.

Outputs:

1. Quality-assured medical products for emergency care will be purchased at sustainable prices points by public sector buyers and donors.

2. African pharmaceutical manufacturers active on the platform will raise the quality of their output, and reduce reliance on foreign providers.

Outcomes:

Consistent access to quality-assured medical products to fight future health emergencies in Africa.

CDI-MPHE will scale up a centralized marketplace for medical products for emergencies. The team has created a three-year roadmap (attached) covering technology, research, customer acquisition and human resources development to demonstrate scale up in the following areas:

• Increased supply of quality assured emergency medical products:

  There is currently no universally defined list of medical products for emergencies. Based on present and past public health emergencies, a sub-set of emergency products will be developed for the CDI-MPHE platform.

• Increased adoption of Good Manufacturing Practices by African manufacturers:

  CDI-MPHE will help incentivize a cohort of African manufacturers, producing the identified sub-set of medical products for emergencies, to adopt international Good Manufacturing Practices by making technical resources and information available to them at subsidized rates.

• Increased procurement of quality assured products:

  As the platform hosts an increasing number of transactions, the project will gather information on the products that have been certified or accredited and help grow the capacity for additional production.

• Reduced shortage risk:

By mapping the supply chains of all participating manufacturers, the platform will identify points of failure for individual suppliers. This will allow the team to address these issues directly with manufacturers so that shortages become increasingly rare.

The CDI-MPHE initiative will measure its impact against three goals, each supported by an objective and measurable indicator(s):

Impact Goal 1: Increase the number of African manufacturers that CDI-MPHE features by 20% over three years of the program.

Objective: Onboard at least 300 quality suppliers and manufacturers on the platform by 2024. Measured by annual onboarding of 100 certified manufacturers to CDI-MPHE

Impact Goal 2: Reduce the prices at which institutions procure health products and essential medicines by 20%. This saving can be harvested through efficiencies in logistics and procurement models, while supporting the sustainability of African manufacturers.

Objective: Increase pooled procurement and logistics efficiency. Measured by:

• Increasing the number of procurement institutions on CDI-MPHE from 2 to 10

• Supporting procurement institutions to purchase at least 5% of their medicines and products for emergencies through CDI-MPHE

• Integrate last mile logistics partners in all 10 priority countries (see below) by end of Q4 2022 

Impact Goal 3: Increase access to essential medicines and health products for 40 million Africans.

Objective: Improve last mile logistics. Measured by:

• Ensuring logistics partners deliver regional orders within 24 hours and national orders within 8 hours.

The expected barriers to CDI-MPHE’s implementation over the program’s three years include:

• Marketing and rolling out the platform in a growing number of jurisdictions. This barrier will be addressed through implementing the customer acquisition plan that the team has created for the next three years.

• Acceptance of the platform by the largest buyers of medicines and medical products for emergencies. This barrier will be addressed through mobilization of distribution partners with existing relationships with buyers.

• Time necessary to source data from regulators on regulatory standards and approved products in order to make it available to program participants. This will be addressed by leveraging existing relationships with continental and regional policymakers.

• Existing market and transportation infrastructure may limit the speed of delivery. This barrier will be addressed by growing partnerships with global, continental, regional and national logistics and last-mile delivery companies.

Donors

• USAID

• CHAI

• DFAT

• GFATM

• WHO

Global and regional bodies

• AUDA-NEPAD

• AFDB

• ECOWAS

• Every Breath Coalition

• FAPMA

• IFPMA

• WAHO

• ECA

• ZAZIBONA

National governments

• Please see list of countries in question 8

Private sector

• McKinsey

• Tony Blair Institute

• PATH

• Gerber technologies

• 54gene

• Afreximbank

• Bank of Industry Nigeria

• Barclays Bank

• Fidelity Bank

The USP/DFS Africa team is applying to The Trinity Challenge in response to the close alignment that we observe between our team’s social mandates and the Challenge’s vision.

More than 200 years after its establishment, USP is proud of its
track record of ensuring the quality of medicines, and actively implements its
commitment to safe and resilient supply chains for pharmaceuticals in the
Global South. USP has been at the forefront of action against the COVID-19 pandemic. USP and its partner DFS Africa, a pan-African group creating
data-based solutions to transform lives on the continent, are ideally placed to realize the Challenge’s vision to “safeguard the lives and livelihoods
of one billion more people by using data and analytics to better identify,
respond to and recover from health emergencies.” The bold thinking behind our solution to bring quality medicines for health emergencies to African
populations blends together dozens of years of experience improving the quality of medicines with the latest technological innovations and data use.
Collaborations supporting the development of our solution extend widely beyond our two organizations, encompassing manufacturers, regulators, regional economic communities, trade associations, and technology providers.

USP’s core partner on this initiative is Development Finance Summit, Africa (DFS). 

• USP will be accountable for overall project management and providing manufacturers on the CDI-MPHE platform subsidized access to USP Document Standards as well as technical assistance and resources on GMP. USP will leverage its Medicine Supply Map to provide information on active pharmaceutical ingredients, identify vulnerabilities in global pharmaceutical supply chain, and develop lists of approved and registered priority medical products for use in health emergencies.

• DFS will develop the technological solutions underlying the CDI-MPHE platform, onboard pre-screened suppliers and purchasers, support transactions on the platform, and work with finance providers to develop potential financial instruments for buyers.

USP has relationships with The Trinity Challenge founding members Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, National University of Singapore, and McKinsey. DFS is already partnering with McKinsey, which supports CDI-COVID through its Manufacturing Africa investment promotion program.

USP and DFS will consider partnering with additional Trinity Challenge founding members Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation for access to their Global Health Data Exchange for data on African population health, plug-ins for real time data visualisations for Country Profiles, and data on specific diseases from the Global Burden of Disease database.