Kerry Shields worked in the healthcare industry before coming to U-M’s Ross School of Business for her MBA and has plans to return to it after graduation. So she was eager to find a MAP (Multidisciplinary Action Project) in a different industry, and was ecstatic when she learned she was part of the WDI-sponsored MBA student team working with the Relationship Coffee Institute and Sustainable Harvest in Rwanda.
The Relationship Coffee Institute (RCI) is a nonprofit, public benefit corporation – or, B Corp – working to increase social and economic opportunity for smallholder commodity farmers and their families. Its partner, Sustainable Harvest, is one of the largest importers of fair trade specialty coffee in the U.S.
“What this company is trying to do is important and innovative and I can learn from that,” she said. “Hopefully we will have had an impact at the end of the project and get a better understanding how a private company can help alleviate poverty.”
The MAP in Rwanda is one of eight student projects organized and sponsored by WDI. MAP is an action-based learning course offered at Ross for MBA students who receive guidance from their faculty advisors. Each project requires analytical rigor, critical thinking, and teamwork. Sponsors receive top-notch deliverables and data-driven recommendations from the team of students.
After learning about their projects and conducting research in the classroom for several weeks, the students then spend three to four weeks working alongside their project sponsors in the field.
Sylvia Jimenez will work on a WDI-sponsored MAP team for CARE, a non-profit organization seeking to use business approaches to address social issues.
“I’m looking forward to getting out of my comfort zone and doing something different than I have done before,” she said. “I think I’ll learn a lot about me as a team player, and learn about my teammates and what their strengths are.”
Ted London, vice president of WDI’s Scaling Impact Initiative, is one of the faculty advisors on the Sustainable Harvest and CARE MAPs as well as two others. Before the teams traveled to their destinations for on-the-ground work, he brought them together for a special WDI-focused session to get to know each other better before they left and to touch on some of the key issues the teams will face in the field.
He discussed what it takes to conduct good interviews, particularly in a base of the pyramid (BoP) market context, emphasizing that the goal of these interviews is to develop data-driven recommendations. Among other things, he also told the students to approach people they meet and interview with respect and humility to maximize the depth and quality of the data collected during the interview.
“You are not only there as expert problem-solvers, but also as experts in learning and listening,” he said. “Only by collaborating and co-creating can we build solutions that really work.”
London said his MAP projects allow students to take what they learned in the classroom and apply it in a BoP context.
“For students interested in working in this space as a career, it is an amazing opportunity,” he said. “These MAPs open students’ eyes to this part of the world and to this scale of enterprise and impact. They’re part of the minority seeing how the majority of the world conducts business.”
WDI and its partners get value from the experience as well, London said. Seven of the eight MAP projects are with partners that have long-term relationships with WDI.
“By leveraging MAP and the great skills of the Ross students, we’re providing resources and expertise to our partners to help them solve the problems they’re facing,” London said. “And it’s a way for us to collaborate with partners in the field, apply our knowledge, and learn what are the next-generation tools we need to think about in the future.”
Here is a summary of each MAP project:
Aravind Eye Care System – India
Advised By: Paul Clyde, WDI and Ross School of Business; Peter Lenk, Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Jackie Barnum, Katie Redman, Alex Kravitz, Matt Tafoya
Aravind Eye Care System (AECS) has five tertiary care centers, six secondary care centers, six community clinics, and 54 primary eye care centers across the Tamil Nadu state in India. Now AECS is expanding, opening tertiary hospitals in Chennai and Tirupathi in the next couple of years, and there are also plans to expand the services/facilities in the existing hospital units.
The student team will customize and test at two to three AECS facilities an existing process model that will measure performance of each unit and is understandable to everyone in the organization.
Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE) – India
Advised By: Ted London, WDI and Ross School of Business; Jane Dutton, Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Karina Cabanillas, David Chang, Takashi Takizawa, Sylvia Jimenez
CARE has been working in India for over 65 years, focusing on ending poverty and social injustice. Its overall goal is the empowerment of women and girls from poor and marginalized communities leading to improvement in their lives and livelihoods.
Most smallholder farmers, a vast majority of whom are women, have limited access to quality and affordable agriculture input, services, finance and technologies. The student team will develop a profitable and socially inclusive business plan that CARE can execute in 2016 that facilitates access for smallholder farmers to inputs and related services. This should be a commercially viable and financially sustainable approach that avoids donor dependency through the development of an agricultural input supply social enterprise in India.
Sustainable Harvest & Relationship Coffee Institute – United States
Advised By: Ted London, WDI and Ross School of Business; Ravi Anupindi, WDI and Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Stacey Nathan, Whitney Augustine, Erdem Eray, Grant Cowherd
Sustainable Harvest of Portland, Ore. is an importer of high quality, specialty grade coffees from smallholder farmers from 15 countries around the world. In 2012, Sustainable Harvest formed a nonprofit organization, the Relationship Coffee Institute (RCI), to help propagate its business model and advance farmer training. In fall 2015, in conjunction with RCI and 4,000 women farmers in Rwanda, Sustainable Harvest launched Question Coffee, which represents its fundamental goal to empower coffee farmers and foster sustainable supply chains. It is Sustainable Harvest’s first B Corp certified product throughout the entire value chain, meaning it’s a for-profit entity that includes positive impacts on society, workers, and the environment. Net proceeds from Question Coffee go to farmer training, which contributes to better quality, improved yields and increased income and wellbeing for coffee farmers at the base of the pyramid.
The student team will conduct research to identify Question Coffee’s value proposition to consumers, resulting in several specific, actionable recommendations on branding and marketing strategies. The team also will devise several recommendations and strategies for greater market penetration.
Relationship Coffee Institute (in partnership with Sustainable Harvest) – Rwanda
Advised By: Ted London, WDI and the Ross School of Business; Jane Dutton, Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Courtney Landy, Aaron Whallon, Juan Marino, Kerry Shields
For this project, the student team will test and evaluate the value of B Corp certification to see if it could improve the lives of smallholder farmers in Rwanda, and how it could be scaled or applied to other commodities.
Zemen Bank – Ethiopia
Advised By: Paul Clyde, WDI and Ross School of Business; Bob Dittmar, Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Dana Yerace, Max Jacobson, Florence Noel, Nicholas Mencher
Zemen is a commercial bank located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Its vision is to bring new dynamism to the financial sector and the banking business in Ethiopia. It is interested in serving small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Using a banking scheme in which Ethiopians living in the U.S. could put a hold on some monetary amount in their bank account, Zemen would then access the account for a low interest loan for Ethiopian citizens starting or expanding a small business. The hold on the U.S. bank would be reduced as the loan is paid back.
The student team will develop the business case for diaspora SME loans and assess the prospects for scaling the program to a level that would interest Zemen Bank. If the scheme were deemed viable, then the team would formulate a plan for executing the program.
Imperial Health Sciences (IHS) – South Africa
Advised By: Paul Clyde, WDI and Ross School of Business; Ravi Anupindi, WDI and Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Amit Patel, Jennifer Paxton, Anuja Mehta, Aric Adams
IHS provides supply chain solutions to the public and private pharmaceutical markets in Africa. IHS and the Imperial Logistics group have adopted the Unjani project as its Corporate Social Responsibility project. Unjani aims to establish a network of nurse-owned franchise clinics in historically underserved communities across South Africa. It has 19 operating clinics with plans to add 25 more by May. The group will take over an independent, failing clinic.
The student team will assess the change in the failing clinic’s success level after instituting the processes, controls, training, and marketing of the Unjani franchise network. Examining the operational and environmental factors of the clinic, along with some financial analysis, will allow IHS to better understand why this clinic failed. That will help IHS further develop the Unjani concept and ensure successful clinics in the future.
ITC Ltd. – India
Advised By: Ted London, WDI and Ross School of Business; Venkatram Ramaswany, Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Nishant Agrawal, Kee Cho, Arun Prakash, Dave Teebagy
ITC is a major diversified Indian conglomerate. ITC’s e-Choupal initiative is enabling Indian agriculture to enhance its competitiveness by empowering Indian farmers through the power of the Internet. The initiative facilitates the two-way flow of goods and services in and out of villages, and describes itself as the largest Internet-based intervention in rural India by a corporate entity.
The student team will help ITC design the next version of e-Choupal. The team will deliver a report exploring how the first three versions of e-Choupal have created value and where further opportunities for value creation may exist. The team also will look into how other models of rural farmer engagement are being deployed in other developing countries, identify the various stakeholders impacted, and highlight how the proposed model creates value for them.
Aparajitha Foundation – India
Advised By: Paul Clyde, WDI and Ross School of Business; Jim Walsh, Ross School of Business
MAP Team: Jamyle Michael, Holly Price, Aaron Steiner, Meghan Sheehan
The Aparajitha Foundation is an arm of the Aparajitha Group. It is committed to the cause of creating transformational change in adolescents by using audiovisual technology to deliver life skills training to economically disadvantaged children in India’s Tamil Nadu state.
The MAP team will develop a complete business plan for entrepreneurship education, training and development. The model should be scalable so that it can be used across the country in the future.
Derek Johnson, director for development and sustainability for the U.S.-based nonprofit charity CURE that operates 10 hospitals in developing countries, recently spoke to students enrolled in the Ross School of Business travel-study course on healthcare delivery in emerging markets.
Students in the class spent the first part of the semester learning about the topic through case discussions, lectures, and guest speakers such as Johnson. The class then split into five groups and traveled to India, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia to work on business and health projects with local partners.
WDI President Paul Clyde teaches the course, which is comprised of mostly Ross MBA students.
While on campus, Johnson spoke with NextBillion Health Care Editor Kyle Poplin who wrote about the organization and its work. Additionally, Johnson recorded a short video interview with NextBillion, an initiative of WDI, which appears at the end of Poplin’s article.
Johnson’s presentation to the travel-study class also was recorded.
Photo courtesy of CURE.
Mel Melaku Negussie, chief operating officer and general counsel of the Ethio-American Doctors Group (EADG), jumped at the chance to partner again with U-M students participating in a travel-study course on healthcare delivery in emerging markets.
He was very pleased with the student team’s work last year, saying one of the things he liked most is that they were on the ground in the country collecting data “as opposed to gathering information from publications.”
“All of this led to high-quality business consulting service last year that was extremely cost effective,” he said. “Since our first engagement, we have validated the quality of the work produced by the team to be equal, if not superior, to top-tier consulting firms.”
BA685: International Business Immersion, which is mostly comprised of MBA2 students, is designed to enhance participants’ international leadership capabilities, increase awareness of diverse business issues on the current global landscape, provide on-the-ground experience in a foreign country, and contribute to the success of partner health clinics and hospitals. The course responds to the increasing need for managers to have an international business perspective to augment their business and management knowledge.
During the first part of the term, students learned about healthcare in emerging markets through lectures, guest speakers and case discussions. Students were then divided into five teams and they prepared for visits to their selected country. They traveled there in late February and early March.
WDI President Paul Clyde teaches the course, which is organized and mostly funded by the Ross School of Business. WDI and the International Institute at U-M also provide financial support.
The EADG, a coalition of more than 250 U.S. doctors of Ethiopian descent who want to establish a state-of-the-art tertiary care hospital in the capital city of Addis Ababa, is one of four partners who collaborated with students for last year’s course. The others are Ruli District Hospital in Rwanda, Grace Care Center in Sri Lanka, and SughaVazhvu in India. Only Unicorpus Health Foundation in India is new this year.
In addition, Ruli, EADG, and Grace Care Center have partnered with WDI on several summer internships and/or Multidisciplinary Action Projects in past years. Being involved with the same organizations year after year in different ways allows WDI to “be more of a partner as the projects continue to grow,” Clyde said.
“We’re developing deep relationships, building trust,” he said. “We have continuity, and the partners know that we will continue to work with them. Further, we know what has worked in the past with other partners and what has not worked. So we bring that knowledge to bear in each project.”
Here’s an overview of the course’s projects:
Ethio-American Doctors Group – Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
The main focus of the project is to assess major equipment needed for the proposed hospital, and determine how much it would cost to maintain and repair these items. The student team will try to determine the total cost for each piece of major equipment, develop an assessment of total utilization and, where relevant, make a recommendation on what to purchase. The team also will make a recommendation on lab services and whether to outsource them.
Unicorpus Health Foundation – Hyderabad, India
A core group of eight clinicians (including a pediatric cardiologist, a neurosurgeon, a pediatric dentist and a senior nurse practitioner for geriatric care) have established a private, not-for-profit organization that will provide healthcare to the elderly in Hyderabad, India. It will target those who can’t afford the more expensive for-profit hospitals but are willing to pay something instead of using the government system. The student project will focus on a business plan for a self-sustaining rehabilitation center in Hyderabad, a city of 8 million. Hyderabad has several advanced tertiary care hospitals but there are very few rehabilitation centers, and those that do exist are very expensive. The current plan is to set up a 20-bed facility as a stopgap measure between hospital and home.
SughaVazhvu Clinics – Thanjavur, India
SughaVazhvu Healthcare implements innovative health systems strategies in expanding access to primary care services to underserved populations in rural Thanjavur, in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. In India, chronic diseases are increasing and pose an additional challenge for rural populations due to the added economic burden. SughaVazhvu’s data show that at least 12 percent of its patients suffer from diabetes, hypertension and hyperlipidemia. The challenge is ensuring treatment adherence among patients, which is critical to prevent terminal complications and associated economic distress. Therefore, SughaVazhvu launched a pre-payment model for chronic disease management for diabetes, hypertension and hyperlipidemia accessible through a mobile clinic. Enrolled patients are offered medication, diagnostic check-ups and consultations with a physician (including lifestyle counseling). The students will put together financial reports to give an idea of sustainability at different volumes, based on a subscription model where patients pay up front to enroll in the service for three, six, nine or 12 months.
Ruli District Hospital – Ruli, Rwanda
Over the past five years, Ross teams have worked on projects for Ruli District Hospital, responding to specific requests from hospital leadership at the time of the project. Some recommendations have been implemented; others have not. After reflecting on this, the hospital leadership believes that one of the reasons some haven’t been implemented is that the staff doesn’t see the need or doesn’t understand how the project recommendations relate to Ruli Hospital’s overall mission. This project is designed to take a step back and lay the groundwork for a staff retreat that will be held in March. The team will interview as many staff members as possible, conduct focus groups, and contact some staff at clinics to gain an understanding of the main challenges that the staff sees in accomplishing the hospital’s mission. The team will then synthesize the findings into topics to be addressed at the retreat. The team also will recommend the best way to conduct the retreat given the constraints at the hospital.
Grace Care Center – Trincomalee, Sri Lanka
Grace Care Center is developing a healthcare delivery model that will reach the poorest parts of the Sri Lankan community it serves. It is a community-based system that regularly tracks certain health metrics and flags those who need further attention by a local physician. The students will develop a subscription model in which patients pay a monthly fee for regular monitoring and, when necessary, specified care by a physician. This can build on some of the work done at Sugha Vazhvu in Tamil Nadu, India, but also utilize the data collection methods under development in Sri Lanka. Specifically, the project will: identify different customer groups based on willingness to pay; develop a way to offer clinically identical but otherwise differentiated services to allow a cross subsidization model to work; and develop financials based on revenue generated through this model and an estimate of costs.
For Erica Dancik, a dual master’s degree student at Michigan Ross and the U-M School of Public Health (SPH), and Tajesi Patel, an SPH master’s degree student, signing up for the course was a no-brainer.
“As a dual degree student focusing on global health and business, there couldn’t possibly be a more perfect course for me,” Dancik said.
Patel said the Ross course gives students a project-based experience working with healthcare providers in-country in addition to discussion of cases that explore innovative solutions in the space.
“There is no other course that I know of that combines theory and practice quite so much on this topic, so I jumped at the chance to take it,” Patel said.
Dancik, who will go to Sri Lanka, and Patel, who will work with Unicorpus in India, are excited to employ some of the things they’ve learned in the classroom, work in a team environment and experience a different country and culture.
“First and foremost, I am hoping to learn about chronic disease management in Sri Lanka and then use that knowledge, in combination with the skills and strengths of my teammates, to answer some of the challenging questions that have been posed by our client,” said Dancik, who will work after graduation with a company focused on chronic kidney disease.
“This project offers me a learning opportunity that I can carry with me as I leave Ross and start in my new position,” she said.
Patel said her team project would allow her to augment her public health background with some business side knowledge.
“I do not expect to be able to get a full MBA’s worth of knowledge from one course, but I would like to walk away from this class with more comfort and skill thinking through the more financial and practical issues of healthcare delivery in these settings,” she said.
She said she is excited to work on the Unicorpus project, which is in its infancy, and looking forward to meeting with healthcare providers, administrators and patients to get a better feel for the local landscape of this type of healthcare.
“There are just so many local nuances that no amount of background research or phone conversations can compare to,” she said, “so actually being on the ground and talking with these people will be invaluable to us in terms of working toward an end result that truly serves the needs and interests of the community.”
Note: This is one in an ongoing series of articles profiling past WDI interns and Multidisciplinary Action Project (MAP) team members and their career paths. Additional profiles in the series may be found here.
With an engineering degree in hand, Patricia Griffin said she was probably destined for a job at an auto plant. But while studying for her MBA at Michigan’s Ross School of Business in 2009, she was part of a WDI-sponsored student team that traveled to a Ugandan hospital.
The experience changed her life – and the course of her career.
As part of the project, Griffin examined Kumi Hospital’s inventory management system and saw that it often ran out of life-saving drugs. She worked with the drug warehouse clerk on some basic supply chain management principles.
“In a matter of seven weeks, the hospital had stopped stocking out of essential medicines and patients stopped dying,” Griffin said. “At that point I realized my skill set was valuable and rare in this part of the world and I could either go back to the auto industry to eke out two seconds of additional productivity on an assembly line or return to Africa and save lives. The right choice was obvious to me.”
After earning her MBA, Griffin took a fellowship with LGT Venture Philanthropy working with Bridge International Academies in Kenya. She also oversaw operations at a nonprofit that partnered with local, smallholder farmers in Kenya to grow trees as a cash crop, and served as an adviser for more than a dozen health entrepreneurs in Kenya and Ethiopia for the global development firm Abt Associates. These work experiences helped Griffin discover where she could best contribute.
In 2014, she started her own company in Kenya – Inagape – that buys fruit from local farmers, dries it, packages it and then sells it as healthy snacks under the name Snak Afya. Its first product is a dried coconut snack food available at Nairobi stores. Plans are to add a flavored coconut snack food and possibly bottled coconut water.
Running her own startup business, Griffin often harkens back to her experience at Kumi Hospital.
As part of the Kumi project, Griffin and three of her fellow MBA students also worked with the staff at Kumi to cut costs so the facility wouldn’t run out of money at the end of each month.
The student team, part of Ross’ Multidisciplinary Action Projects (MAP) for MBA students, divided expenses into four categories – transport, food, medicine and medical supplies.
“We did a deep dive to see how the money was really being spent,” Griffin said. “At the end of seven weeks, we were able to make several recommendations on cost-saving initiatives and even implement some of the ideas.”
One example was that the hospital had two separate pharmacies serving outpatients and inpatients, but only one set of staff that had to walk about 50 yards between both. The hospital wanted to hire a second staff but the MAP team instead created one pharmacy with two service windows. The solution saved the hospital time and money by eliminating the need to hire more staff and making better use of the existing staff’s time.
When Griffin revisited the hospital in 2013, the two-window pharmacy was still in operation. “We’d spent our last weekend in Uganda executing that cost-saving recommendation, so seeing it still intact and functioning was affirming,” she said.
One of the lessons Griffin learned at Kumi was to ask questions and never assume anything. Like, for instance, why two pharmacies?
“I happened to ask why there were two pharmacy rooms in the first place and the answer I received was nothing I could’ve imagined,” Griffin said. “Apparently, during the Ugandan civil war, guerrilla groups would raid the hospital at gunpoint for medicines to treat wounded fighters in the field. When all the medicine was stocked in one room, the entire inventory would be stolen. Cleverly, by separating the pharmacy into two rooms, they’d only lose half their stock.”
That story stayed with her. She also reflects on the advice she received from the late C.K. Prahalad, one of her professors at the time, about working at the base of the pyramid. Prahalad encouraged her to sense an opportunity and then take the leap of faith “with both feet.”
“When the going gets tough and I feel like giving up or throwing in the towel, I think back to the number of sacrifices I’ve made to successfully switch careers,” she said. “I also re-read the encouraging note that Prahalad wrote to me on the bottom of my final essay for his class. It reminds me again why I wanted this career in the first place.”
And she thinks back to the lessons from that WDI MAP experience.
“Questioning my assumptions and taking nothing for granted has become a basic mode of operation for how I conduct my career and life,” Griffin said. “That’s a direct result of the MAP experience.”
The leader of two ventures in Kenya that serve those living at the base of the pyramid spoke Nov. 18 as part of the WDI Global Impact Speaker Series.
Madison Ayer, executive chairman of Honey Care Africa and co-founder and chairman of Farm Shop, talked about the unique challenges – including poor infrastructure, security concerns, informal regulations, and high costs – of integrating low-income producers and consumers into the supply chain. But, Ayer says, overcoming these barriers can lead to long-term competitive advantage and positive economic impact on communities across the supply chain.
Watch Ayer’s presentation here. Watch Ayer be interviewed by WDI Senior Research Fellow Ted London here.
“Madison is a successful entrepreneur who has turned his focus to base of the pyramid (BoP) markets,” London said. “He launched and subsequently exited two successful IT ventures in the U.S. In BoP markets, he helped turn around Honey Care, and then founded and led the development and growth of Farm Shop.”
Honey Care Africa supplies smallholder farmers with beehives and harvest management services. In addition, it guarantees a market for the beekeeper’s honey at fair trade prices, providing a steady, consistent source of income.
Farm Shop is a social enterprise that serves smallholder farmers across Africa. Farm Shop recruits and trains franchisees that then independently operate community-level agro-dealer shops that supply farmers with all they need to improve production, including seeds, fertilizers, tools and veterinary medicines.
WDI researchers have studied the two ventures in the past. As part of a project, funded by the German development agency GIZ, WDI studied the current landscape of BoP facilitators in the sub-Saharan Africa region. As part of this research, WDI’s Scaling Impact initiative conducted field visits to Ethiopia and Kenya – including the two ventures run by Ayer.
WDI’s Performance Measurement team also conducted a qualitative impact assessment in 2012 to identify the impact of Honey Care Africa on alleviating poverty on children age eight years and younger and developed a case study as part of the series entitled Focusing on the Next Generation: An Exploration of Enterprise Poverty Impacts on Children. The goal of the series, funded by the Bernard Van Leer Foundation, is to gain a greater understanding of the ways in which businesses in emerging markets impact young children’s lives and the potential to optimize impact on children. WDI also wrote and published a popular teaching case study on Honey Care Africa that examined the business’s transition from obligating farmers to maintain their own hives to providing hive management services. The case also explored ways to enhance this new model, including strategies to reduce side selling.
To watch a one-on-one video discussion with Ayer and London, click here.
Global Water Challenge (GWC) is a coalition of 24 leading organizations creating a global movement of transformational change around water and sanitation. GWC focuses on collaborative learning, connecting leaders, and investing in sustainable, scalable and replicable projects. The coalition’s goal is universal access to clean water and safe sanitation. On this particular project in Ethiopia, World Vision Ethiopia was acting as GWC’s implementing partner. Student intern Brock Redpath worked with the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) program at World Vision Ethiopia and conducted an assessment on the efficiency of their project implementation.
Addis Hiwot is a private hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Ethiopia-Michigan Platform for Advancing Collaborative Engagement (EM-PACE) is supported by the Global Challenges for Third Century grant from the University of Michigan Office of the Provost. It seeks to address some of the most pressing problems identified by country leadership and stakeholders in Ethiopia. Student intern Nancy Kasvosve examined business models that allow private hospitals to also serve low income populations in Addis Ababa.
Abt Associates is a mission-driven, global leader in research and program implementation in the fields of health, social and economic policy, and international development. The student MAP team assessed how the Health Enterprise Fund (HEF) has supported enterprises in creating a foundation of partnerships to help them transition to scale. The team also identified opportunities for enhancement of the Enterprise Fund.
Abt Associates is a mission-driven, global leader in research and program implementation in the fields of health, social and economic policy, and international development. The student MAP team assessed the feasibility of using revenues garnered from higher-income diplomatic and expatriate members to subsidize subscription services provided to the poor communities in Addis Ababa. The team also worked to understand the costs associated with differentiated product offerings for different product segments.
Over the past seven years, Supply Chain Management System (SCMS) has been the backbone of HIV/AIDS programs worldwide, distributing over USD $1 billion worth of essential medicines (e.g., antiretrovirals) and other health commodities to various countries around the world. In fourteen African countries, SCMS has contracted local vendors to supply commodities valued over USD $100 million. The WDI helped document the impact of the SCMS program on local business and economies in four countries — Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia — and developed a white paper on lessons learned and accomplishments achieved thus far.