Management Sciences for Health to Continue Lifesaving Work in Ukraine, Madagascar

Arlington, VA–February 23, 2023–Management Sciences for Health (MSH) has received two USAID program extensions to continue its vital work in Ukraine and Madagascar, where the organization has been supporting public health improvements, in close partnership with the countries’ health officials and USAID, for more than a decade. The extensions will fund both programs until 2025. 

MSH’s current work in Ukraine, funded by USAID and PEPFAR under the name Safe, Affordable, and Effective Medicines (SAFEMed) for Ukrainians Activity, started in 2017 to support health-sector reforms with the goal of improving the selection, procurement, and distribution of lifesaving medicines, including treatments for tuberculosis and HIV—two infectious diseases of high prevalence in Ukraine.  

Among its notable achievements, SAFEMed contributed to the creation of a centralized medicines procurement agency within Ukraine’s health ministry that has, for example, resulted in more transparent, cost-effective, and timely delivery of essential medicines. The program also coordinated a partnership between the government and a private pharmaceutical logistics company to ensure last-mile delivery of HIV treatments—an effort that received the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals 2021 Supply Chain Innovation Award. SAFEMed has also been instrumental in keeping medicines flowing in Ukraine throughout the war by providing technical support to design, coordinate, and monitor the supply chain system necessary to deliver a substantial proportion of the humanitarian medical assistance arriving in the country from governments and private donors in Europe and North America. 

In Madagascar, the extension will fund ongoing efforts to improve access to—and uptake of—primary health care services. MSH leads the implementation of the Accessible Continuum of Care and Essential Services Sustained (ACCESS) program, which supports the Ministry of Public Health as it works to reduce maternal, infant, and child morbidity and mortality by increasing access to quality integrated health care services and medicines and promoting the adoption of healthy behaviors. 

The program has worked closely with the Ministry to improve the performance of facility-level health care providers and has trained and supported more than 18,000 community health volunteers, who play a pivotal role in the country’s primary health-care system by carrying out work that includes educating communities on the proper use of bed nets for preventing malaria, providing family planning services, and responding to infectious disease outbreaks. ACCESS also led the creation and deployment of a mobile app that has dramatically increased the quality of community-level primary care by standardizing treatment and case management, collecting and sharing patient and medicine stock data for improved decision-making, and performing disease surveillance during the country’s outbreaks of pneumonic plague in 2017, measles in 2018, and, more recently, COVID-19.  

“The expansion of these programs reflects our teams’ expertise and impact, which are the result of our long-term partnerships with both countries,” said Marian W. Wentworth, President and CEO of MSH. “It is also recognition of the teams’ courage, focus, resilience, and results in the face of war, pandemic, and rapidly changing population needs.” 

More information about MSH’s work in Ukraine and Madagascar, respectively, can be found here and here.