The USAID Global Health Supply Chain Technical Assistance - Tanzania Program (GHSC TA-TZ) provides specialized technical assistance to the Government of Tanzania to strengthen country supply chain systems across health elements. In coordination with in-country and development partners, GHSC-TA-TZ supports the government of Tanzania to optimize agile, robust, and sustainable health supply chains, including strategic planning in-country logistics, capacity building, and strengthening enabling environments. 

OBJECTIVE • The goal is to support the development of agile, robust, and sustainable health supply chains that will contribute towards improving medicines availability and ultimately the health status of Tanzanians. 

KEY RESULTS

 Holistic Supply Chain Review.

 GHSC-TA-TZ partnered with USAID and the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar (RgoZ) to conduct a Holistic Supply Chain Review (HSCR), covering all aspects of Zanzibar’s public health supply chain. The HSCR directly informed the strategic planning process including the goals, objectives, initiatives, and measures used by the incoming government to shape public health outcomes.

 Emergency Supply Planning. 

The project developed an Emergency Supply Chain (ESC) plan to support national, regional, and local preparation for and response to Ebola, Marburg, Cholera, Aflatoxicosis, mass casualty injury, other viral hemorrhagic fevers, and other infectious disease outbreaks. The ESC was so successful at shaping risk management and risk mitigation of pandemics and natural disasters that the government of Tanzania (GoT) used the guidelines to plan and execute relief missions to Cyclone Idai victims in Mozambique and to support national, state, and local response to COVID-19.

Forecasting and Supply Planning. 

GHSC-TA-TZ designed and implemented a forecasting and supply planning process that informs over $300 million in annual donor-funded medicines, vaccines and other health commodities spanning all vertical programs—HIV, Malaria, TB. The GHSC-TA-TZ forecast, or “quantification” is a key input to Tanzanian public health planning and features close collaboration and coordination with USAID’s Procurement Services Manager (PSM), The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and informs budget formulation for essential medicines and health commodities purchased by the GoT and the RGoZ. 

Optimized regimens Transition Support. 

GHSC-TA-TZ provided planning support to transition first-line HIV/AIDS patients to DTG-based regimens and implemented Multi month dispensing (MMD) smoothly. The project’s analyses helped the GoT make informed decisions on the transition process, demand-based ordering magnitude, and the timing of formulation shifts. The MMD effort reduces the burden of warehousing and distributing by materially decanting volumes from central medical stores, intermediate warehouses, and facility pharmacies and improves health outcomes by reducing the number of times patients return to a pharmacy to receive DTG based r.

Logistics Management Information System.

GHSC-TA-TZ provides full software development lifecycle support to Tanzania’s electronic logistics management system (eLMIS). eLMIS informs and executes supply chain planning and operations activities for 5,000+ facilities. The system is utilized by facility personnel to perform stock capture and replenishment ordering. eLMIS has a robust reporting feature which enables facility, district, regional, and national level personnel to monitor item stock status, detect stock outs, and manage stocked according to plan across hundreds of commodities nationwide. Proliferation of eLMIS has materially improved supply chain management by digitizing formerly paper-based processes and has provided a degree of insight into supply chain performance not previously possible. 

Capacity Building with IMPACT teams approach.

The project developed the Information Mobilized for Performance Analysis for Continuous Transformation (IMPACT) Team approach to introduce health supply chain personnel to eLMIS and build their supply chain data utilization capacity to better manage supply chain performance. The IMPACT Team approach is key to building institutional capacity that supports informed operational and financial decision making as well as continuous process and performance improvement at MOH, the President’s Office, Regional Administration and Local Government (PO-RALG), and the facility level. 

Capacity Building with eLearning.

GHSC-TA-TZ developed an eLearning platform to enable online learning across the Tanzanian health supply chain ecosystem, providing direct support to health supply chain staff while reducing the costs associated with in-person training and enhancing sustainability. 

Original source can be found here.