The Joint Interagency Task Force and the Global Steering Committee for the Quality Assurance of Health Products: Two New and Proactive Approaches Promoting Access to Safe and Effective Medicines

Financing mechanisms such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria support programs run by local experts in countries and communities that most need funding. Those programs help to save lives every day. However, expanding access to medicines on a global scale can face challenges posed by falsified, substandard, stolen, and diverted medicines. The Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) is an initiative that offers a new, proactive, and intelligenceled approach to safeguarding the delivery of quality medicines for major donor organizations and protecting public health by identifying falsified medicines in countries where they appear. By also focusing on the issue of stolen and diverted medicines, JIATF provides an important assurance mechanism. A core focus area of the Global Fund component of JIATF (GFJIATF) is its National Engagement Strategy (NES), which serves as a launch pad to develop partnerships and provide training and logistical support to partners within a country’s national drug regulatory and law enforcement community. This national system strengthening compliments and augments health systems strengthening overall. Through its work, GFJIATF is assisting its drug regulatory agency and law enforcement partners at the national level to identify vendors engaged in the trade of illicit medicines, providing support to successful enforcement operations and helping to disrupt those criminal networks engaged in this trade. These outputs promote better public health outcomes by removing falsified products from circulation. Through a carefully developed framework of data collection and analysis, its NES, and the establishment of a broad coalition of international partnerships, the GF and its fellow core members in JIATF are helping to protect drug quality as an integral part of their organization’s core mission to expand access to safe and effective medicines. The GF is also a founding member and the Secretariat for the Global Steering Committee (GSC) for quality assurance of health products, which is a voluntary coalition of health development institutions focused on improved access to safe and effective medicines and chaired by Norbert Hauser, the chair of the GF Board. Current Core membership of GSC includes Gavi, the Global Fund, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), UNITAID, the U.S. Presidents Malaria Initiative (PMI), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. Food and Drug Agency, the World Bank, and the World Health Organization (WHO). Inaugurated in November 2014, the GSC will harness the collective efforts of multilateral and bilateral organizations, national authorities, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and drug companies to facilitate an enhanced assurance framework for both quality and supply chain integrity of health products.