Poster 11

Enhancing commodity accountability to advocate for resource allocation: A case study of Kirinyaga county (73)

LMIS is an important and critical unit in every health system structure. The health facilities today face numerous challenges including incomplete and inaccurate data on commodity data, late deliveries to facilities, high rates of stock-outs of essential medicines and losses through expiries and thus leading to low resource allocation. The ideal scenario for improved service delivery especially in low resource setting would be availability of commodities and real-time or near real-time stock data management data to provide quick responses especially due to shortages. The use of excel spreadsheets by health facilities to report on consumption and stock on hand has had a huge impact on improving the visibility of data for key commodities in Kirinyaga county. These excel sheets are filled out by the facilities and sent to the sub-county manager, who compiles the data for all the facilities and delivers it to the county commodity in charge for decision making and advocacy in terms of resource allocation with the county executives. The data from this tool has been useful in proper forecasting and quantification of essential commodities, as well as in demonstrating commodity visibility and making decisions on supply chain interventions such as redistribution. Most importantly, because the tool includes a cost for each commodity, the county has used the data to increase the budgetary allocation to pharmaceuticals based on forecasted consumption. This tool’s future is to be integrated into a mobile application to provide real-time or near-real-time data visibility.

Elga Chepkorir¹, Dr Onesmus Mutiso²

¹Project Global Health Supply Chain – Afya Ugavi Activity, ²HPTU Head – Kirinyaga County, Kenya