African Medicines Quality Forum to improve quality control of medicines
The prevalence of sub-standard and falsified medical products in Africa is a huge challenge. NEPAD Agency, United States Pharmacopeia (USP) and the Economic Community of West African States – West African Health Organization (WAHO) have agreed to work together to establish a medicines quality control forum to address this challenge to ensure that African people have access to safe, efficacious and quality medical products.
The organizations have agreed to transform the Network of Medicines Control Laboratories in Sub-Saharan Africa (NOMCoL–SSA) in to the African Medicines Quality Forum (AMQF). AMQF shall represent the new vision of NOMCoL and will expand its scope to cover all countries on the continent in alignment with the African Medicines Regulatory Harmonization (AMRH) Initiative. The end goal of AMQF is to significantly reduce the prevalence of sub-standard and falsified medical products in circulation on the African markets.
USP has already been supporting activities under NOMCoL since 2009 with initial funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Similarly, NEPAD Agency has also designated Regional Centers of Regulatory Excellence (RCOREs) for quality control of medicines and WAHO runs several programs aimed at strengthening capacity of medicines quality control laboratories in West Africa. These organizations shall now align these initiatives under the umbrella of the AMQF to help prevent duplication of work, foster consolidation of resources and help to sustain the activities over an extended period of time.
The new AMQF will be aligned to the AMRH governance structure and sub working groups to address various activities that impact the quality control of medicines in Africa. A detailed roadmap for this new direction of NOMCoL Africa shall include the creation of a platform for a holistic continental quality control agenda that facilitates sharing best practices, promoting cooperation between quality control laboratories, setting conformity assessment standards, providing technical leadership in quality control and serving as an advocacy platform to raise national and international visibility of the quality control laboratories.
The decision to establish AMQF was made during a USP facilitated meeting in Accra, Ghana that took place from 02 – 03 March 2017. The meeting was attended by directors of quality control laboratories from Cote D’Ivoire, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Mali, Seychelles, Malawi, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Botswana. The NEPAD agency and ECOWAS-WAHO were also in attendance.