Public private partnerships could cure Africa’s healthcare challenges

To address these challenges, much is being done through forging and nurturing partnerships between corporate, public, and civil society to ensure synergy in efforts towards improving healthcare services in the SSA.

The goodwill by governments has also enabled pharmaceutical companies to take up an active role in ensuring the region is not excluded from accessing medicines and therapeutics available in developed countries through partnerships with like-minded organisations.

However, over the past 20 years, addressing the major, unresolved global health challenges has evolved from purely donation-based programmes, towards models with sustainable social impact.

The drive to create expanded access for patients is also increasingly anchored on systematic public-private partnerships (PPPs) that create public health awareness and build capacity among healthcare providers in Kenya.

As a case in point, the Familia Nawiri initiative spearheaded by Christian Health Association of Kenya (CHAK) hospitals and Novartis has put in place measures to manage diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, breast cancer, epilepsy, eye diseases, sickle cell disease (SCD) and malaria.

This approach has also gained ground in Senegal where the CARDIO4Cities initiative has made significant inroads with an aim of increasing early detection of cardiovascular diseases as well as putting in place new clinical guidelines and data systems.

Within 18 months of the project's duration, we have seen impressive results. The percentage of patients with controlled blood pressure on medication tripled from 6.7 percent to 19.4 percent, while data captured grew from 470 to 6,056 patients.

Partnerships in capacity building among healthcare workers have also helped widen access to healthcare.

As a case in point, the Familia Nawiri initiative in Uganda has partnered with the Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau and the Protestant Medical Bureau to build the capacity of health workers as well as creating awareness about NCDs.

Racey Muchilwa is the President and Head of Novartis SSA.