Building a regional network of academic experts to increase capacity in pharmaceutical management in East Africa

International public health initiatives such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief have significantly increased the volume of medicines in Africa, particularly antiretroviral medicines; however, these increases are straining already weak pharmaceutical management systems, which constrains access to essential medicines. Effective pharmaceutical management is important for the successful implementation and scale-up of public health treatment and care services.

The RPM Plus Program is providing technical assistance to Makerere University in Uganda to develop and coordinate a regional network of institutions to build capacity in pharmaceutical management. The Regional Technical Resource Collaboration for Pharmaceutical Management comprises groups from Makerere University; Muhimbili College of Health Sciences in Tanzania; University of Nairobi in Kenya; and The National University of Rwanda. These institutions are leading in-country initiatives to build the capacity of health care workers to manage medicines by developing and adapting training materials, training health care workers, and developing effective approaches for skills building in low-resource settings; for example, the monitoring-training-planning (MTP) intervention places tools and responsibility for skills building in the hands of local staff. To date, MTP has been implemented in 18 facilities in Kenya and Uganda. In addition, Makerere University has trained over 100 district-level healthcare workers on HIV/AIDS pharmaceutical management and has helped set up a pharmacovigilance system for Uganda's malaria control program. Providing technical assistance to academic institutions in resource-limited countries and fostering regional collaboration is an efficient way to build institutional capacity.