Malaria

SPS’s malaria program activities in Uganda aim to accomplish the following objectives—
Malaria is responsible for more illness and deaths than any other disease in Uganda, except AIDS, and the health system is acutely affected by the burden of the disease. In 2005, RPM Plus started providing technical assistance to Uganda through the President’s Malaria Initiative to strengthen its pharmaceutical management system to support the rollout of artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) for malaria.

Activities have included helping the National Medical Stores streamline its ACT distribution and supporting the National Drug Authority’s efforts to phase out monotherapies, which contribute to antimicrobial resistance. In addition, we collaborated with the National Malaria Control Program to establish an information system to track medicine stock and consumption to ensure that facilities always have the medicines on hand.

To further increase access to ACTs in the community, SPS is helping implement a strategy to improve ACT availability in private sector facilities, where most Ugandans seek treatment for malaria; for example, we are supporting the National Drug Authority’s reclassification of ACTs as over-the-counter products.


HIV/AIDS

International initiatives have significantly increased access to life-saving medicines in developing countries; however, in sub-Saharan Africa, the resulting expansion of treatment programs is stretching already weak health systems that suffer from inadequate capacity to manage the medicine supplies. To address these weaknesses, SPS supports Makerere University to coordinate a network of academic institutions in East Africa to develop capacity for pharmaceutical management. The East Africa Regional Technical Resource Collaboration for Pharmaceutical Management includes Makerere University in Uganda, the University of Nairobi in Kenya, the National University of Rwanda, and Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences in Tanzania.

SPS also sponsored Makerere University to implement a monitoring, training, planning (MTP) pilot program. MTP is a facility-based skills-building approach to pharmaceutical management. Based on the experience in Uganda, MTP appears to be a cost-effective and sustainable intervention to build local human resource capacity to scale up HIV/AIDS services.


Local Partners

Infectious Disease Institute
Makerere University