MeTA Annual Review

It has been an exciting first year for MeTA and we are delighted to present our Annual Review 2008-2009.

The year started with a launch in London in May 2008, and today multi-stakeholder forums are in place in all seven countries participating in the pilot phase of MeTA – Ghana, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Peru, the Philippines, Uganda and Zambia. Representatives from government, the business sector and civil society are for the first time sitting round the same table to find new ways to make medicines more accessible to the people who need them most. At the heart of MeTA is the need to generate good quality and robust information about the medicines sector. This is difficult in competitive environments with multiple and conflicting interest. Stakeholders in MeTA may come from different backgrounds and have different interests, but they all share the same goal: to make good quality essential medicines available to poor people at an affordable price.

The MeTA Annual Review 2008-2009 looks at the achievements made in the first year by each country, some of the key lessons learnt at country and international level, and highlights perspectives from MeTA stakeholders. Some key lessons learnt at country level include:

• Commitment of stakeholders is key. If you don’t have committed people, the process will fail.
• Making sure the right people are that table is critical and it takes time.
• Some problems in the medicine supply chain require tough political action to solve. Time and trust is needed to do so.

Starting work on less controversial issues is key. Stakeholder perspectives are highlighted. “One of the best things that happened to us is to bring together all these stakeholders round the table. Now we can transparently and openly agree to disagree, or agree to agree on certain points” said Kenneth Hartigan-Go, Executive Director of the Zeullig Family Foundation, and member of the MeTA Council in the Philippines.

“My interest in MeTA – in fact the interest of the industry – is to actually make all of our information available. There is a certain perception that the local industry produces sub-standard drugs. I think it would be good that transparency comes up around this, to see how drugs are regulated, and if the quality of the drugs we make is not up to standard, then we should be held to book” said Paul Lartey, CEO of LaGray Chemical Company, and member of the MeTA Council in Ghana.

Please download and read the MeTA Annual Review 2008-2009 for more information and make your comments here.