Improving the Public Distribution of Essential Medicines in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Zambia

Despite remarkable and successful recent improvements efforts by the government and its partners, the current public distribution system of essential medical drugs in Zambia still results in low availability to patients relative to private sector standards. We present an original explanation of this performance gap based on extensive field data, and develop an alternative system design involving mobile devices and optimization. We report simulation results suggesting that this proposal would improve drug availability at the clinics and reduce inventory and drug expiry costs, and ongoing field implementation efforts.  (joint work with Prashant Yadav and Zachary Leung)

Bio: Jérémie Gallien is an Associate Professor in the Management Science and Operations Area at the London Business School. His research focuses on pushing the frontier of supply chain management practice through collaborations with private sector firms such as Dell, Zara, Décathlon and Amazon. In particular, his research group has designed control systems that are now used on a large scale by several global corporations, and for this work Gallien was inducted as a Laureate in the 2009 Edelman competition. His most recent projects involve the analysis and improvement of global health supply chains, in collaborations with institutions including The World Bank, The Government of Zambia and Crown Agents. He holds a Ph.D in Operations Research from MIT and an Eng.D in Industrial Engineering and Applied Mathematics from the École des Mines de Paris.