Supply chain transformation technical assistance.
Ethiopia is undergoing significant positive changes from economic and humanitarian perspectives. The Ethiopian Government has assumed an ambitious economic programme in the hope of becoming a lower-middle-income country by 2025. The improvement of the healthcare system is a crucial step within this reform. It involves, among other things, the consolidation of its health supply chains.
Recently, due to a collaborative effort and support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, it has been recognised that most investments to date in the Ethiopian Pharmaceuticals Supply Agency (EPSA), a key organisation in the Ethiopian health supply chain, have primarily focused on systems, infrastructures and specific technical inputs. Now, EPSA is investing in an element that is crucial to the organisation: its people.
The Human Resource for Supply Chain Transformation Programme known as Admas (which means horizon in Amharic) was launched in March 2019. The programme is owned and led by EPSA, supported by PSA and its partners and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Admas is designed to facilitate the empowerment of people to deliver health products. The programme’s activities are centred around fully realising EPSA’s employees’ skills and competencies. The programme is intended to provide an enabling environment, including a robust organisational culture component led by the EPSA board. The Admas programme looks at how information and data can support operations effectively and how management and leadership can be supported, challenged and grown. The Admas programme will find innovative, tailored ways to build EPSA’s dedicated skillsets, to drive change towards an enabling environment. We hope that this support will contribute to the transformation of the country’s health supply chain, and by the end of the period in September 2021, the public health supply chain in Ethiopia will have achieved a maturity level of Silver (based on the Frontier Markets Supply Chain Maturity Model). This achievement would mean that all facilities would have 85-95% product availability, basic visibility, regular funding execution, and a supply chain operation managed by people with the required technical and soft skills and guided by appropriate directives.