He was responding to a question as to what usually leads to slow supply of drugs in health facilities.
“It is important for us to note that the procurement system of Gambia Public Procurement Agency (GPPA) is slow. In as much as it is good to safeguard, and bring about accountability and transparency, but for the drug procurement, there are a lot of challenges,” he laments.
“The timeliness of quantification, preparation of bidding documents, sending the bidding documents to GPPA to get approval, bringing it back, conference committee meetings, advertisement of the drugs, evaluation of the solutions, selection, standstill period, contract signing, and release of funds from Ministry of Finance all these are different type of process we go through before acquiring our drugs from importing companies,” Minister Samateh explained.
“For the companies, the whole process is estimated to take up to six months. Now, if this takes six months of the year, if it is for 2024, for example, and then we need to procure for 2025, if we process in 2024, all these procurement process mentioned take place, then the allocation of the budget for 2024-25 wouldn't have been out because it will start in January. So that means even if these things were allowed to go ahead in 2024 for 2025, then it's only in January 2025 they could be paid an advanced payment,” he further explained.
“It is only after payment that they start counting the number of days they will take to supply, while the number stays up to less than 90 days. That's already three months. So you see that has gone up too much for that particular year.”
“So this procurement method is a big challenge. Now, if procurement were to start in 2025 itself, by the time they would have decided on it would take towards the third quarter of 2025 for everybody to be able to get good supplies.”
“The major problem we will be having is the unreliability of the supplies. When these tenders have floated, it is international competition, a lot of suppliers participate and our team also does the assessment, evaluation, and all necessary requirements.”
“Winners are selected for the past few years, and those that won the biggest chunks of these drugs are Gambians but unfortunately, they're not delivering,” he said.
“The availability of drugs and other health consumables, medical consumables is very critical to the success of any health system,” he emphasised.
“All health systems require adequate amount of drugs and consumables. In the case of The Gambia, it is not different. What makes that of The Gambia different is 100% of the drugs and medical consumables in the hospitals are imported.”
