Experience & Partners

Experience

Through the years, SAPAM has worked with the member states, SADC Secretariat, civil society, private sector and other stakeholders to increase access to medicines and diagnostics. Our programme interventions are aimed at increasing transparency and regional market integration, supporting the harmonisation of medicines regulation, control, procurement, storage and distribution. The following achievements were realized:

Development of the SADC Pooled Procurement Strategy for Essential Medicines and Health Commodities approved by the Ministers of Health in November 2012
Development of the Medicines Database (SADC 2012-14); Information & Price Sharing Database for Common Wealth Secretariat (2021)
Updated the SADC Pharmaceutical Business Plan 2015 – 2019
Development of the Pharmaceutical Procurement Supply Management standards and good practices for use by SADC countries in streamlining systems and procedures for increased efficiencies
Review of intellectual property and patent laws to enable SADC countries to take advantage of the TRIPS flexibilities
Creation of vehicles for Civil Society to participate in improving access to medicines through advocacy and monitoring systems
Development of real time evidence based technological solutions for collection, analysis and applied intelligence, such as: data on stock-outs of medicines at community facility level (TENDAI), Geo-location data solutions and IoMT (Internet of Medical Things) solutions. All combine a user-friendly input process with a robust database, accessible via responsive web portals. Success stories were compiled showing how TENDAI was used to influence policy changes in countries and improvements in the supply of medicines
Updating and aligning of SADC regional medicines registration guidelines to ICH Common Technical Document (CTD) format – agreed for adoption in the region by the SADC Health Ministers in November 2013
International organisations, such as CHAI, MSH, NEPAD, UNIDO, UNFPA, UNDP and WHO have supported or complemented SAPAM’s efforts through participation in activities, technical and training assistance or co-funding certain projects.

We have also worked and collaborated with the following partners: