Dear IAPHL Members,
As the COVID crises continues, I note how well some of the countries in Africa and Asia have done to address the pandemic. I am sure that the great work that our members in those countries are doing has contributed to this success. I know that for most of our members, COVID has presented many challenges and those on the ground are working overtime to support their respective countries approaches to test and treat their populations. Certainly, this pandemic has highlighted the importance of good supply chains. As the hope for approved vaccines continues, their availability to the population will rely greatly on the work that our members do.
In November, I attended the virtual Global Health Supply Chain Summit, as did many of our members. Following that virtual conference came the SAPICS one where we were able to offer 22 scholarships to our members to cover the registration, thanks to SAPICS. I hope that many of you found the reporting from the scholarship recipients informative. We continue to post the many webinars concerning health supply chains and hope that the members are taking advantage of the knowledge and discussions that they provide.
I am very happy to report that USAID has refunded us to support the IAPHL secretariat and some of our activities. In addition, it is just recently that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded us a grant! This new grant will allow us to do several things, including reaching out to our members to ascertain the capacity building and growth needs of the membership, better support our country chapters, and provide scholarship funding for members to attend supply chain conferences next year.
We continue to work with the USAID funded assessment team. I believe they will be sending out a questionnaire to the members in early December. It is great to see that members have been very positive about replying to such a questionnaire. Thank you for your time on this given that people are so busy.
We continued with our Chapter Leader Spotlight Series. In November, we posted my interview of Jenny Froome from South Africa. We should be posting my interview of Umesh Kumar Gupta from Nepal in a week’s time. We hope to have one more interview to share this December. As always, if you have missed any of these short interviews, you can find them on the IAPHL website.
So all the best to everyone. Season’s greetings for those who celebrate the many holidays that take place in December and a Happy New Year for those who follow this western calendar.
Please stay safe,
Walter