Central Medical Stores Trust is lobbying stakeholders to have a legal mandate for pharmaceutical production which it hopes could help reduce by 15% the budget it uses to procure drugs and expedite distribution to health facilities in the country.

Board chairperson for the Trust Josiah Mayani said during the 6th and 7th annual stakeholders review meeting in Mponela that they have already started working on initial processes to venture into production of medicines beyond the three mandates of procuring, warehousing and distribution of drugs.

“This is part of CMST's vision to help transform the pharmaceutical landscape in Malawi in line with Malawi 2063 development aspirations,” Mayani said.

He added, “the money we have been paying simply because of the logistics not the medicine itself but logistics is just a lot so if we can be doing it locally, because what we will be doing is simply procuring raw materials which are in small quantities thereby easing the processes.”

Delays to deliver medicines to health facilities CMST said sometimes is caused by processes involved to procure medicines from institutions outside Malawi.

Parliamentary committee on health chairperson Mathews Ngwale said parliament is more than ready to support such ambitious ideas aimed at promoting the health sector while facilitating attainment of Malawi 2063 development aspirations.

“Our economy is struggling therefore what we are interested in is ideas that can make our institutions independent, for example Central Medical Stores Trust should start thinking of how or what it can do to be independent, to be free from government coffers,” explained Ngwale.

Besides reducing procurement costs, the mandate to start manufacturing medicines, CMST believes will also enable it to maintain an allowable percentage of expired medicines by the World Health organization standards.

The trust’s board chairperson told Zodiak Online that reforms they have been implementing lately have paid dividends in minimizing the percentage of drugs that expire in its warehouses from 18% to 2%.

The reforms include digitizing records of stocks in the warehouses for easy tracking once an order is received from district hospitals, the system of quantifying orders which was done at district health facilities without liaising with the Trust and the thirdly flexing of the buy Malawi strategy which some suppliers and manufacturers were abusing, according to Mayani.

The Trust believes increasing its mandate to start manufacturing medicines will also help it maintain the recommended standard for expiries as some drugs will be manufactured according to demand locally.

“Before, you have heard in the newspapers that we were dumping around K4 billion worth of medical supplies, this time around we have reduced the number we are now within the international limit which is 2% of the total holding capacity so the K4 billion that time we were around 18%,” recalled Mayani.

As CMST is hatching the concept of producing medicines within the country, health rights activist Maziko Matemba feels this calls for serious consideration to have the Africa Medicines Agency protocol ratified to ease access and marketing of medicines produced in Malawi within the Africa region.

“AMA is a very important new initiative introduced by the African Union – NEPAD which is helping countries to increase and build capacity of medicine regulatory but also at the same time provide an opportunity about manufacturing of medicine or buying of medicines in bulk so that we don’t see stock outs” explained Matemba.

Almost half of African union countries, Matemba added, have signed the treaty which enables Africa countries to work together on processes required to access and test or verify medicines procured.