A note from the new moderator
Geoffrey Ngiwra
Greetings, Salutations, Bon dia to you all,
Rob Verhage introduced me several weeks ago to the group. I have since been able to meet with colleagues from Zambia and Tanzania and now looking forward to meeting with you colleagues in the DRC, Angola and Lesotho very soon. Thanks also to Farooq from Botswana for the warm welcome to the forum.
During the recent visits by the Pooled Procurement team to Seychelles, South Africa, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania, there was largely consensus on the potential benefits of sharing information on procurement sources, quality and prices. This was, of course, after a demonstration navigating through the Medicines Information Sharing Platform at http://sadc.meddb.medicinesinfohub.net/. As you are busy and trying to meet your deadlines to avail health commodities to your health system, you can actually relieve your stress by comparing your information with what others have recently done. Be it on your own performance at availing quality products at reasonable cost, or whether it is time to expand your sources of supply to timely get the products you need, the Medicines Information Sharing Platform can be of assistance.
You know we started with about 50 products which have now extended to more than 70, with items that countries indicated that they have a special interest in. I see the Platform soon further expanding to include even those products that are hard to find or to attract suppliers for due to small needed quantities as well as with medical supplies that are currently taking up a large share of available budgets. Key to success is to share such information; hence the visits by the SARPAM team to countries.
Information sharing is the first step of collaboration among countries in the SADC Pooled Procurement Strategy as approved by Health Ministers from the Member States in November last year. Also we would like to accelerate the work sharing aspect, which is the development and implementation of agreed regional good practices, by providing you with opportunities to pose questions to colleagues in other countries on procurement and supply chain issues, as we have all SADC countries in this forum. Further to that we will be looking at procurement and supply management standards that can be implemented across countries in the region in order to strengthen our collaboration.
In a separate email, I will be communicating guidelines on how to post messages onto the forum and how you can interact with me as a coordinator of discussions and with Leen Jille, who speaks and writes Portuguese and French comfortably and can do the necessary translations for the benefit of our colleagues in French and Portuguese speaking countries.
Best wishes to you all.Geoffrey Ngwira
Regional Consultant - Pooled Procurement
Southern African Regional Programme on Access to Medicines and Diagnostics (SARPAM)
Phone: +260 973 202 753; +265 994 608 005
Email: geof...@sarpam.net
Website: www.sarpam.net