2023
Celebrating Resilience
Scroll down to read our end-of-year report
Scroll down to read our end-of-year report
We brought our members together in Accra for our first in-person General Membership Meeting in 4½ years. Under the theme of Resilience, 280 participants celebrated our community's strength and ingenuity through the pandemic years and beyond. We launched global conversations on the diversification of financing and on regional manufacturing and we consulted with our members in person on the re-design of the RHSC Strategy.
In 2023, we identified and filled new key roles in our Secretariat; 23 staff with 14 countries of origin currently work in 10 physical locations around the world, increasing our technical capacity and scope for engagement with our members.
At the close of this year, the RHSC is 580 members strong — 55% of whom are based in low- and middle-income countries, with 28% in Sub-Saharan Africa alone.
The Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition's strategic work addresses three bottlenecks in commodity security: inadequate funding, power imbalances in the supplies market, and weak supply chains. This year, these 3 M's—Money, Markets, and Movement— continued to shape our work in increasing access to a broad choice of high-quality, affordable RH supplies.
The resources needed to finance supplies.
Top highlights from 2023
In Peru, we helped grow a private midwife network to more than 1,400 midwives who operate in low-income areas. This year, the RIAMA midwife network completed its transition from donor-funding to a self-sustaining network with a revolving fund used to procure contraceptives. This fund has grown by 327%.
Under our Compass initiative finance series, Avenir Health published research on contraceptive supplies funding patterns before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. A new interactive data annex used new data from RHViz/VAN, the FP Market Report, and UNFPA country surveys to complement this research.
The complex landscape connecting demand and supply.
Top highlights from 2023
Over the last three years, the VAN helped procurers like USAID and UNFPA mobilize more than US $70 million in new orders for member countries, avoided waste by supporting product reallocation worth US $4.67 million in cancelled and transferred orders, and supported the expedition of 86 orders to mitigate supply shortages.
Building on its foundational work to engage 36 member countries, the VAN offered eligible governments additional services and features to lead joint supply and demand planning.
This year, the business intelligence platform SEPREMI, originally in Spanish, became available in English, opening it up to 19 English-speaking Caribbean countries.
The driver of product availability from manufacturer to the last mile.
Top highlights from 2023
Under our flagship LAPTOP initiative, we awarded scholarships to 14 young women and 14 young men from LMICs to further their studies in supply chain management.
We helped the NGO TAN UX'IL in Guatemala explore how to provide RH supplies and services to migrant women journeying from Central America to the US border.
Under our Compass Initiative, an RHSC-commissioned report produced by inSupply Health investigated Covid's profound impact on RH supply chains and explored adaptations that stakeholders in sub-Saharan Africa have made in order to maintain access to RH commodities.