The Access to Medicine Foundation works to stimulate and guide global pharmaceutical industries to increase health equity for people living in low-and middle-income countries. In January 2021, the Foundation released their annual Access to Medicine Index which reports how 20 leading pharma companies make medicines, vaccines and diagnostics more accessible for people in low- and middle-income countries.
We were thrilled that the NJIA programme is featured as a best practice on the Access to Medicine website, and to also have NJIA’s scale up to India in late 2019 reflected as one of eight contributors for Roche’s rise in the Index ranking to number 9!
NJIA is a unique collaboration between Pepal, F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, McBride and Lucius, NGOs and government partners in Tanzania, India and Uganda to develop leaders and drive innovation in the context of improving cervical cancer outcomes. Since 2015, hundreds of leaders have come together to improve access to cervical cancer screening and treatment and ultimately, to save lives. Through solving urgent challenges on the ground, participants enhance agility, strengthen inclusive behaviours, identify root causes of issues, apply problem-solving skills and create “early wins” in cervical cancer prevention solution testing, leveraging peer-to-peer networks.
The programme has shown sustainable success - for example, leadership development is now a strategic objective in Tanzania’s 5 year National Strategic Plan for Cervical Cancer Prevention and Control.
NJIA’s classification as best practice for improving global access to medication also shows the sustainable impact the programme can have for our corporate partners. The programme supports the development of leaders at Roche who are more aware of, and better able to, collaborate with healthcare ecosystems who are serving the patients of today and tomorrow, fulfilling the Roche company purpose of ‘doing now what patients need next’.
Together with Roche, Pepal are using the unprecedented global change, and huge need for leadership, we saw in 2020 to make our programmes more sustainable, scalable and impactful for all partners. We have respond to leadership and governance needs in real time and launched an online programme, iNJIA. We hope that our efforts and the continued success of both NJIA and iNJIA will contribute to Roche’s rise in the Index in the future!
