29 April 2016 - The Stop TB Partnership this month, for the first time, organized a workshop specifically aimed to help civil society representatives from a selected group of countries better under-stand procurement and supply chain management (PSM) in order to increase access to TB drugs, diagnostics and other commodities. Experience has proven that a broad cooperation with commu-nities and civil society leads to more accurate data, which in turn increases accountability in pro-curement and supply chain management.
Civil society partners can catalyze change by optimizing the interactions between global health initi-atives and national health systems. By training these civil society representatives, cooperation be-tween stakeholders can be improved in order to address challenges in access to TB medicines and diagnostics. Throughout several sessions, participants received an introduction to the basics of PSM, the functioning of the Stop TB Partnership's Global Drug Facility and drug procurement sys-tems.
The participants were overwhelmingly positive on the benefits of the training."This workshop is very helpful, it has shown me that we need to plead with the national TB program and the govern-ment to better involve civil society in the supply chain of medicine," Olivier Rusumba, from the Congolese NGO Ambassadeurs de la lutte contre la Tuberculose said, "Our strength is TB case detection, but more and more we see that the recovery rate has not followed. We started work in 2011, with help from TB REACH and today I see that we have done great work in terms of detection. We can identify more people suffering from TB, but we cannot treat them because of medicine stock ruptures."