Hope springs eternal

Uganda has long struggled with health supply quality issues such as counterfeiting and quality-related complaints. To address this, Uganda’s National Medicine Stores recently set up a team to develop quality mechanisms and increase the confidence of end-users and the international community.

Some thought she was too young for this senior post and was audacious to even aspire toward it.

LAPTOP Scholar Hope Fortunate Achiro applied to lead this dedicated team as the Chief Quality Control Officer of the National Medical Stores. But there was a catch. Some thought she was too young for this senior post and was audacious to even aspire toward it. But Hope was undaunted; her response to them was: “Knowledge is out there and available for anyone who works hard enough to acquire it; we should all aim to learn what we need to and aspire to what we want to be”.

Hope got the job but knew that the learning curve would be steep. This is where her LAPTOP Scholarship-funded course kicked in. She undertook the Supply Chain Professional Program at Pamela Steele Associates and was able to leverage her course curriculum and tutors’ expertise to learn as much as she could about quality in the supply chain so that she could hit the ground running in her new job. And perhaps equally importantly, completion of the course boosted her confidence and gave her the courage to tackle the demands of her new role, she says.

In her supply chain work, Hope always keeps clients in the forefront of her motivation, in the face of widespread inequities in healthcare access. “As a young woman starting out in this field, I was invariably angry at the avoidable leakages across the supply chain making a bad situation worse. As a developing country, the budget for essential medicines was inadequate yet I saw that what was procured for public health facilities was often diverted to private facilities” she says. “You cannot start a supply chain thinking about manufacturers, you have to start backwards, you have to think about the end-user first.”

“I see the futility of people dying of malaria because of a lack of antimalarials, some of which are as cheap as one dollar.”

Hope attributes her spirit of advocacy to her “difficult childhood” and faith in God. Having lost her parents as a young child, Hope was adopted by a couple who were both medical doctors and instilled in her the usefulness of an education in the sciences, and subsequently, in pharmacy, which is how her supply chain journey began. “I see the futility of people dying of malaria because of a lack of antimalarials, some of which are as cheap as one dollar,” she says. “Collectively as a global community we can make essential medicines available to all who need it by eliminating supply chain challenges to increase access. I have always wanted to stand up for the vulnerable and the voiceless, and today, I am working towards Ugandans having access to a choice of high-quality medicines that they need.”