Local Digital Innovation Improves Family Planning in Uganda
Uganda has one of the youngest populations in the world, with 77% of its citizens under age 25. Despite tremendous strides in the last several years to improve access to family planning resources and supplies, there remains a large unmet need, which hovers around 40% in some regions.
With a small grant and technical support from the USAID Local Health System Sustainability Project (LHSS), a Ugandan pharmacy and logistics company, MM Partners Logistics Ltd. (MMPLL), expanded its e-Pharmacy platform to include more family planning products and increased the capacity of its dispensing staff to provide better counsel to clients on reproductive health and family planning.
Accelerating Progress Through Local Partnerships
Increasing access and uptake to family planning commodities is intended to positively impact several key indicators for women’s health, including maternal mortality, fertility, and teen pregnancy. With limited government funding, Uganda has worked to establish partnerships with private sector partners to ensure product availability and increase awareness and uptake of services.
LHSS selected MM Partners Logistics Ltd. (MMPLL) in Uganda, a local private sector pharmacy company, as the recipient of a small-scale grant (>$100k) and technical support focused on increasing access to and uptake of family planning services and products through digital innovation. LHSS grants are designed to help strengthen sustainable host country health systems capacity. Through grants under contract, LHSS engages with local institutions and organizations to build their capacity, developing their administrative and management capabilities to compete for and implement direct awards from USAID and/or other clients and donors.
This grant, funded by USAID’s Commodity Security and Logistics Division and the Office of Population and Reproductive Health, aimed to enable local partners to scale their digital platforms, improve their technical capacity, and increase their reach. The grant helped MMPLL enlarge its impact in family planning and advanced USAID’s commitment to localization—a key initiative that ensures local actors lead approaches to strengthen local systems and improve outcomes for their communities.
Digital Innovation Key to Unlocking New Gains in Family Planning
Since 2010, MMPLL has operated in Uganda as a small, retail brick-and-mortar pharmacy chain with around a dozen locations in Kampala. Its ePharmacy platform, DrugsExpress, is one of the most recognizable online pharmacies in the country, with deliveries made throughout the day all over the city by motorbike.
Beginning in early January 2024, digital and private sector specialists from the LHSS Project began working with MMPLL to review the performance of DrugsExpress, both for business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) sales, and to explore areas of improvement and innovation. With funds from the LHSS grant, MMPLL quickly identified a roster of local software engineers, marketing specialists, and family planning experts to launch an ambitious project to enhance the organization’s digital tools and technical capacities.
Digital Improvements
MMPLL’s project enhanced the B2C platform’s performance by rebuilding its basic architecture to be more sustainable and scalable and creating a custom app now available on the Google Play store. The organization also launched a better B2B app, creating a more streamlined experience for its wholesale customers, and built a handful of other internal apps to make their ordering and delivery services more traceable and efficient. LHSS specialists worked with MMPLL to identify further potential improvements, including ways to support customers through improved communication channels and elements of security, user experience, and data analysis. LHSS also helped MMPLL identify a useful data visualization tool—PowerBI—and set up a dashboard for future data analysis.
I like to get family planning products from a private pharmacy because they are easy to access, have long opening hours, and are located within my community. I like the DrugsExpress platform because it’s private and very convenient.
- Diana, a mother, pharmacist, and family planning client of MMPLL
All digital enhancements made under the activity were aimed at increasing the availability of family planning products to Ugandans seeking care and commodities from the private sector. For example, while updating the B2C and B2B platforms, MMPLL added several new family planning products to its catalog and featured family planning products in a new banner at the top of the sales page.
Capacity Building
In addition to the major strides the organization made in improving and scaling its digital tools, MMPLL’s staff and consultants worked with LHSS marketing and private sector engagement specialists to identify areas of technical capacity strengthening for family planning. Using the expertise of a local family planning expert, MMPLL brought its drug dispensing staff together for trainings focused on: proper counseling for contraceptives; guidance on product choice; discreet, empathetic, and inclusive provider behavior; and linking customers to further information and services. Following the training, MMPLL plans to make information on family planning available in an easy-to-follow “cheat sheet” format for its dispensers and continue their education through its partnerships with other local and international family-planning focused organizations.
Partnerships
MMPLL established crucial new partnerships with family planning actors in Uganda that may not have been possible without the LHSS grant. From increased engagement with the USAID mission to strategic memorandums of understanding with Marie Stopes International (Uganda) and VIYA Uganda (a global sexual wellness lifestyle brand started by PSI), MMPLL expanded its outreach efforts to fully embed its pharmacy platform and services into the fabric of Kampala’s family planning networks. In addition, MMPLL was invited to participate in total market approach (TMA) multi-stakeholder discussions for family planning with the national government and participated in Government of Uganda-led workshops to shape the regulatory environment for the fast-moving ePharmacy space.
While we have achieved much together, we know that this amazing journey between those in need of healthcare services, our company, the Ugandan government and Ministry of Health, family planning partners and providers, and Abt Global, has vast potential to scale and impact the healthcare landscape in Uganda and beyond. It has been an honor to work with the LHSS Project and tackle some of Uganda’s hardest challenges with special consideration for the values, communities, and people we include and support.
- Moustapha Musaka, Owner and Operator of MMPLL
What’s next for digital innovation in health?
In July 2024, USAID Administrator Samantha Power declared, “Development is digital.” Her speech coincided with the launch of USAID’s new Digital Policy, which aims to define how the U.S. and its partners are accelerating development progress and humanitarian response using digital technologies. In her remarks, Power mentioned several examples similar to the work of LHSS and MMPLL in Uganda where digital innovation is making a real difference in people’s health around the world.
As innovators like MMPLL and partners like Abt Global consider how we will shape health activities and support communities through our activities and projects, we know that the future is local, digital--and very bright.
