About The Campaign
Launched in February/March 2009, this campaign is a call to action for African governments to meet their obligations to provide essential medicines by increasing the national budgetary allocation for the purchase of these medicines and by ensuring efficiency and transparency in the procurement, supply, and distribution of medicines. The campaign is an initiative of Health Action International (HAI) Africa, Oxfam, and a number of African partners – with the support of the Open Society Institute (OSI).
What Are Stock-outs?
Stock-Outs is when a pharmacy (in a medical store or health facility) has no medicine on the shelf for a given period of time. Stock-outs are worst in rural areas and poor people are the most affected. Stock-outs force people to buy medicines at much higher prices from the private sector. More often, patients simply go without the medicine they so badly need – often with life-and-death consequences.
Major Causes of Stock-outs
- Poor quantification and forecasting at all levels of healthcare
- Inadequate financing
- Poor stock and records maintenance
- Inefficiencies at all levels of the supply chain
Consequences of Stock-outs\
- Death due to lack of medicine to treat the illness
- Patient may develop resistance due to poor adherence to treatment
- Increased out of pocket expenditure that eats into the family wage/earnings
- Sharing of medicines/irrational use of medicines
- Patients seeking alternative treatment options which are mostly expensive
- Loss of morale of public sector staff, resulting in brain drain to better facilitated sectors
- Patients walking long distances to another health facility which might not have the medicine in stock either
Key Campaign Objectives
Access to essential medicines is a human right and a cornerstone of an effective primary health care system. Access to free essential medicines determines whether people live or die, suffer pain and discomfort, or have their ailments cured, recover from illness or endure life-long disease. At the World Health Assembly in 1977, our governments made a commitment to ensure these essential medicines are available in public health facilities.
Yet today, over 30 years later, at any given moment, public health facilities in Africa have in stock only about half of a core set of essential medicines. These are medicines used to treat common diseases such as malaria, pneumonia, diarrhoea, HIV, TB, diabetes and hypertension – all of which are among the highest causes of death in Africa.
Ways of Working
The campaign partners use various methods of work to eliminate stock-outs; these include:
- Information sharing
- Advocacy
- Lobbying
- Workshops and trainings
- Information and communication technology
Campaign Achievements
- Pill check week – a week where researchers visited public health institutions to check on the availability of 10 essential medicines. Using innovative technology, they then reported the results through short messaging services (SMS) to a common site, and the data have been reflected in an online mapping of the country that shows areas where medication is out of stock.
- Public forums held in Kenya and Zambia
- Lobbying governments in country and at continental level
- Increased awareness about stock-outs
- Increased media coverage of stock-outs
- Stock-out testimonies booklet
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