Opinion: Local system innovators vital in fight against fake medicine

It took us a grand total of 3 hours to recognize in 2007 that no one can solve the problem of fake medicines with an app.

That is why right from the start we favored an interlocking set of partnerships to address the problem. We figured being a nonprofit would help make us a more effective broker. So we set up as one in Ghana.

Then we went to Hewlett Packard (then the world’s largest tech company by some measures), several of the biggest telecom companies in the world, the national pharmaceutical industry associations, the local GS1 office, and consumer rights and industry reform activists.

To give you an idea of the lengths we were willing to go, consider how we signed up one particularly major telecom operator (telco).

John Chambers of Cisco used to run a partnerships event in the southern US. We needed unusual concessions in Ghana. So one of us flew to South Carolina, in the heart of the Bible belt, and got introduced to the CEO of a global telco by the head of the world’s largest advertising company.  The endorsement of our plan came to Ghana right from the global c-suite. 

The telco was now willing to listen to us as we pitched to them an idea of making premium shortcodes toll-free so poor people could verify their medicines.

Ensuring access for all

Bear in mind, telcos then typically charged 3 times to 4 times the normal rates for shortcodes and here we were trying to convince them that “fake medicines” was such a big problem that only a service equally accessible to rich and poor would work. It was hardly our app that mattered. It was our values.

Soon, the point was reinforced. It was not about whether or not we were a nonprofit. It was about whether or not we were “business as usual” or “transformational.” In fact, seeing as we had poor connections in the nonprofit space, philanthropic capital was out of the question. 

We needed to focus on building a sustainable solution model that paid for itself through the savings we could make for the disparate actors we knew we had to bring together to address the problem. We called ourselves a “social enterprise” because it was the only well-known term that captured what we were about.

Today, there is another term — “systems entrepreneurship,” which is apt too because solving something as entrenched as counterfeiting involved building whole new networks of solutions. It is not something you just stick on a product and plug into android.

Founder of mPedigree, Bright Simons

For example, what happens when your fancy NFC or blockchain-enabled app marks a product out as counterfeit? How does law enforcement utilize the data? Based on which protocols? And the patients? What are their rights? How does the protocol safeguard those rights?

A matter of definition?

What is a “counterfeit” anyway? Just an imitation of a brand? Or do we count original products that don’t meet quality standards? Whose quality standards? What if they meet quality standards but aren’t registered for sale in the national market?

What if they are fully registered, but people still get a serious adverse effect (say, due to an allergy) and “believe” it to be fake and need reassurance? Who talks to them? How do you preserve trust? What if the product is imported and batch records received at the port make it hard to trace events in the supply chain back to the source?

Quite evidently, the questions cannot be answered by an app. Not even by a collection of apps. It is a system of solutions that is required, some technological and some ideological, but always systematic. 

Who will bind these systems of multiple actors, interests, priorities, responses, programs and protocols into a coherent whole? System entrepreneurs. That’s who. Innovators who don’t only build “end solutions” but also act as intermediaries for other nodes in the system. Who surface latent trends. Who can build “interface trust” for disparate actors to work together. Innovators who can build “multistakeholder platforms.”

Let’s call these platforms, honeycombs, because they give shape and form to hives of networks.

Africa’s pioneering role 

The amazing thing is that Africa is very much ahead of the rest of the world in putting out demonstrations of just how such a system can work in practice — systems that cover the last mile (“last patient” really) and connect the point of care both to the upstream supply chain and the regulatory process. Systems already in use allowing patients in remote Northern Nigeria to connect to the source of their anti-malaria drug in a way a patient in Washington DC cannot do yet.

The problem is scaling these ideas. Africa is still not regarded as a source of best practice. So even as the world desperately searches for solutions, Africans are not at the table as powerful advocates for ideas that work locally and could be even more effective at the regional or global level if adequately resourced. 

There are those who think that Africa should just be a passive recipient of solutions in this area of patient empowerment and trust, as has happened so often in the past in other domains.

Unfortunately, “fake medicines” constitute what one might call an “embedded system” problem. 

Answers cannot be imposed from overseas through imported protocols or apps. 

The solutions call for the broader germination of effective ideas planted by local system entrepreneurs. 

African governments and intergovernmental agencies need to pay attention to the insights and experiences of those who have been grappling with the huge task of forging the webs of partnerships necessary for rolling out solutions to this pernicious, multifaceted problem.

Bright Simons is an entrepreneur and social innovator from Ghana. He’s also the founder and president of mPedigree which has assumed global leadership in securing products against faking and counterfeiting through the use of mobile and web technologies.

Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/opinion-local-system-innovators-vital-in-fight-against-fake-medicine/a-51082586?maca=en-rss-en-bus-2091-xml-atom