Medicines for All

I spent this week in Nairobi, at a workshop of NGOs from east and southern Africa involved in work around access to medicines. They were brought together to try to come up with ideas on how to solve the problem of regular shortages of essential drugs at government health clinics.

These days there is a lot of awareness of HIV/AIDS, and there are several campaigns to push governments to roll out and sustain anti-retroviral treatment for people living with AIDS. What we wanted to do was expand that activism and awareness to health in general -- to include not only ARVs but essential medicines for a range of diseases and conditions. 

It's just about 30 years since the World Health Organisation drew up protocols on Essential Medicines, and every country is supposed to have an up-to-date list of Essential Medicines and ensure that these are always available in the public health system.

Essential Medicines vary from country-to-country depending on the public health situation, but range from headache tablets, to treatments for diarrhoea and malaria, antibiotics, anti-virals, folic acid (for pregnant women), and so forth.

Governments across the region profess to supply these, but the reality is that in every country there are regular stock-outs of these drugs. That is: there is the constant problem that certain -- or all of these drugs are simply not in stock at the local clinics. The reasons are many: poor planning, lack of funds to buy drugs (although most essential medicines are very cheap), corruption (where officials steal drugs and sell them for their own profit), too few healthcare workers in clinics, and so forth.

Another problem is that people often struggle to get to clinics, because of large distances, and lack of transport and decent infrastructure. 

The meeting in Nairobi was organised by Health Action International-Africa, the Southern African Treatment Access Movement (SATAMO), and the Open Society Institute. Nine African countries were represented, involving a range of NGOs working in this field.  

At the meeting everyone resolved that stock-outs are unacceptable, and that access to affordable essential medicines is a human right. A region-wide campaign is being planned to highlight the problem of stock-outs, mobilise citizens, and pressure the authorities to act and ensure 100% availability and accessibility.