The Southern Africa Programme on Access to Medicines and Diagnostics (SAPAM) was launched in January 2010. SAPAM is founded on the belief that collective action and innovation will improve Access to Medicines across the regional economic community. Working with member state governments, civil society, regional institutions, international agencies, research networks and the private sector, SAPAM will support the work being done through existing partnerships and initiatives, as well as identify new Partnerships for Action that will achieve ambitious results.
(011) 880 - 6993/4
This programme offers new resources in the form of targeted funding, technical assistance, partnership building and networking opportunities. As the primary sponsor of this new initiative, the UK Government, through DFID funded SAPAM, and developed it into an open platform for collaboration and partnership, becoming a broad support base over 5 years. Now this base is a source of opportunities to substantially improve the marketplace for good quality and essential medicines.
SAPAM offers to support and strengthen the capacity of regional institutions to implement plans that will benefit from multi-country action. The SADC Pharmaceutical Business Plan endorsed by regional Ministers of Health in 2007 is the leading example of this. Civil Society Organisations within the region support the drive to positively influence the pharmaceutical market, including the demand for medicines and their rational use. New development innovation seed funding could be made available to promising new Civil Society initiatives.
A regional information hub, the SAPAM InfoHub makes transparent pharmaceutical market intelligence and evidence for policy accessible to all stakeholders in the region. SAPAM carried out an intensive Pharmaceutical Market Analysis in the first 9 months of 2010 to provide a baseline data set. The SADC medicines database, built with contributions from all the central medical stores of this region, is the source of pricing, suppliers and related quantities. .
The Responsible Action Consortium, led by Re-Action! has been contracted by DFID to manage the implementation of SAPAM. This includes establishing a network of development professionals to work with the DFID Southern Africa regional team so that priorities on Access to Medicines within SADC can be more effectively responded to and local capacity can be built.