Examining — and Celebrating — our Community’s Resilience
By Martyn Smith, Director, Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition
The Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition’s (RHSC’s) General Membership Meeting (GMM) took place 16–20 October 2023 in Accra, Ghana. The meeting’s theme was Resilience, but the meeting’s visual motif was the djembe, a West African drum. Indeed, the meeting’s opening session included a powerful call-to-action incorporating a live drumming session in which 280 people learned to play the djembe with Ghana’s Master Drummer Dela Botri.
But why drums?
For centuries, drums have been used to communicate, celebrate, and call to action. What gives the drum its unique sound? The drumskin or drumhead is fitted over the body of the drum at this stage, the drum makes almost no sound, but then the drumhead is stretched and tightened, tuned and tested and stretched again. More and more force is applied until finally the drumhead reaches a perfect level of resilience and then something amazing happens. The drum’s resilience allows it to make rich, powerful sounds loud enough to call out inspire and empower.
Over the last four years, our reproductive health supply community has experienced its own time of being stretched and tried and tested. Yet our community came together to find solutions, and the power of our partnerships shone through.
Helping us explore this key theme of resilience were Copper Rose Zambia CEO’s Natasha Kaoma and RHSC’s VAN Director Julia White, focusing on personal and professional stories of resilience with a diverse range of speakers from across the supply chain and ecosystem, considering disruption, adaptation, innovation, and resilience. In conversation with Natasha, Mukul Taparia, CEO of Pregna detailed the critically important dialogue which took place between manufacturers, customers, donors, partners, and very importantly employees, to find innovative solutions to the unprecedented challenges being faced. Hope Achiro of Rocket Health Africa set out that due to adaptation and innovation during the pandemic “digital technologies are here to stay, and it can help us leapfrog some of the challenges that we have, including in reproductive health, commodities and supply chain.”
Martin Guitierrez, Chair of ForoLAC, spoke of Latin American and Caribbean region (LAC) as one of the worst affected regions of the world by COVID and highlighted the bravery and the commitment of the health workers, volunteers and personnel from across the supply chain in responding to the pandemic and working to maintain access to RH supplies. ForoLAC has been crucial to creating different channels of communication throughout the whole membership in the region.
Marie Ba of the Ouagadougou Partnership (OP) spoke to the experience of resilience in the region with five out of the nine OP countries being in the Sahel dealing with climate change, migration and the challenges of resource mobilization. Marie set out that it was very important to have the commitments that the countries made to the international community (to FP2030 and to the OP) and their being able to stick to those promises that they made with most of the countries have been able to still carry those those objectives.
Julia White reminded us all that the Global Family Planning VAN was just a pilot in 2019 and yet now, four years later, we can marvel at “how crucial this visibility has been for our community during a global pandemic and increased instability”. VAN Ambassadors from Liberia, Rwanda, Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Niger, Ghana, Malawi and WAHO, detailed how no country was immune from supply chain shocks and that our collective strength has come in working together to solve issues and that when inevitable disruption strikes, we have collaborated with creativity and resilience. Our RH supplies community affirmed our collective ability to persist, create and innovate in the face of great challenges.
Here’s to sustaining the drumbeat.
