Event Details

The Journey to Self-Reliance: Sustainable and Resilient Supply Chains for Equitable Access to Healthcare. 

Description

The severe impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on global health systems and supply chains highlighted the importance of supply chain capability and diversification in ensuring timely access to life-saving medicines and healthcare. As countries take steps to build more resilience into their health supply chains, there is an opportunity for country-led supply chain diversification to incorporate greater self-reliance. To capitalize on current progress, continued efforts are needed to accelerate governments' commitment, strengthen local capacities, and harness sustainable partnerships across the public and private sectors

At last year’s GHSCS, we discussed how to re-imagine health supply chains and systems for equity, resilience, and country ownership. A key topic that emerged from these discussions was the potential for self-reliance in health supply chains to support dependable end-to-end service delivery. This year we will explore the various forms of such self-reliance and the likely steps on the journey to their achievement—from cultivating an enabling environment through governance and innovative financing mechanisms, to supporting and scaling innovation, and enabling local supplier development and regional manufacturing.

GHSCS 2023 will explore these issues through a combination of keynotes, panel discussions, and contributed talks. Like in the past, the conference will assemble a collection of experts that include government representatives, academics, NGOs, civil society, industry, donor, and multilateral representatives to explore these topics. The committee is particularly interested in capturing the voices from the field to learn and share experiences related to the conference theme and mechanisms to achieve these goals.