Procuring for quality in Southeast Asia

The circulation of substandard and falsified medical products poses significant health challenges across South and Southeast Asia. In India alone, three to four percent of drugs were found to be substandard or falsified. For national procurement agencies that are tasked with sourcing quality-assured medicines, it is especially important that appropriate measures are in place to avoid procuring poor-quality medical products.

What’s at stake

While the globalization of medicine supply chains has provided greater access to medicines worldwide, effective oversight remains uneven. Procurement processes across Southeast Asia often vary, are driven by pressures to purchase the lowest cost commodities, and may not be well-defined.

Procurement programs that don’t prioritize quality assurance weaken the integrity of supply chains, put patients’ health at risk, and undermine trust in medicines and health systems.

Project at-a-glance

Timeline: 2021 – 2022
Countries: 8 (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Timor-Leste, Thailand, Sri Lanka)
Donor: World Health Organization (WHO)
Technical areas: Supply chain management Procurement

Project goals and objectives

Assess national and state procurement agencies to determine their level of compliance in implementing quality-assurance criteria using a modified self-assessment tool.
Develop recommendations to inform institutional development plans for procurement agencies that strengthen and build on best practices.
Disseminate key findings and lessons learned across the region to promote knowledge exchange and cross-country collaboration around quality assurance.

Results

Working in partnership with WHO in the Southeast Asia region, the project achieved the following milestones:

Developed a modified self-assessment tool for procurement agencies to adopt that includes a harmonized list of key performance indicators that will allow agencies to continuously monitor and measure their performance in implementing critical quality assurance criteria.
Completed three national self-assessments in Indonesia, Timor-Leste, and Nepal, and two state self-assessments in India across Tamil Nadu and Gujarat.

In addition, we’re collaborating with the national procurement agency in Indonesia to create recommendations for an institutional development plan that will build national capacity to assure the quality of medicines being procured and distributed.

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