Country Overview
Today, Tanzania’s ART program has reached more than 170,000 patients, compared to 1,500 at program launch.
In Tanzania, more than 400,000 people are estimated to be eligible for antiretroviral therapy (ART) nationwide. The country began distributing ART in the public sector in 2005. Today, Tanzania’s ART program has reached more than 170,000 patients, compared to 1,500 at program launch. Access has been expanded to more than 700 sites.
SCMS supports the government’s efforts through rolling out an integrated logistics system (ILS) for managing all drugs and medical supplies, as well as an improved antiretroviral (ARV) and HIV test kits management system for sites that provide ART and HIV testing services. We also provide quantifications and regularly updated supply plans for ARVs and handle procuring for PEPFAR programs in Tanzania. Currently, we are assisting the Medical Stores Department (MSD), which oversees the country’s centralized distribution system, with warehousing solutions, materials handling processes, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) review.
Key Objectives
- Share information: Build a trusted ordering and reporting system that delivers products in a way that is reliable, consistent and easy to use.
- Build capacity: Strengthen the capacity of the central Ministry of Health to collect and analyze data, and to quantify needs.
- Maximize procurement and distribution: Meet the country’s unprecedented procurement needs and work with the National AIDS Control Program to coordinate the use of funding from all sources for maximum coverage.
- Monitor supply chain logistics: Place supply chain monitoring advisors (SCMAs) in the field for information gathering and sharing, and serve as a critical part of an “early warning system” that can identify and report potential or impending logistics system breakdowns and related issues before they impede ART service delivery.
Activities and Impact
Value of commodities delivered as of January 2009: $49 million
Logistics: Under the leadership of the National AIDS Control Programme (NACP), SCMS redesigned the logistics system for ARVs and HIV test kits in Tanzania to accommodate the government’s ambitious scale-up plan. We prepared and facilitated a training of trainers (TOT) workshop, including standard operating procedures and logistics management information system (LMIS) tools. The systems program, designed to support an increase in ART sites from 225 sites to 692 sites throughout Tanzania, has resulted in the training of about 1553 service providers in 21 mainland regions.
Forecasting: At the request of NACP, SCMS conducted a quantification including a one-year forecast for 12 priority opportunistic infection (OI) drugs in 2008. SCMS’s quantification marks the first time a systematic approach has been used to forecast OI drugs.
