This week VillageReach President, Allen Wilcox, will be speaking at the 2nd Annual Global Health Supply Chain Summit. The theme of this years conference is “Bringing Government, NGOs, and Academia Together: What can be learned from the for-profit world?” We are excited to be included in this conference again this year- the theme alone could be a subtitle for VillageReach’s mission. Allen will be speaking about what logistics and supply chain bring specifically to the last-mile. VillageReach’s experience shows that since the last-mile is often much weaker than the rest of the health system, programs can have a disproportionately large impact by effecting change at this level. Our colleagues at the Zaragoza Logistics Center have been doing terrific work bringing their academic backgrounds to bear on problems in global health supply chains. As the “implementers” in the field, VillageReach has found that working with academics provides them with a useful real-life case study and provides us with access to sophisticated, cutting-edge, cross-sector knowledge and best practices, so far it’s really been a win-win and we are excited to continue the work.
