PROJECT
Ghana Essential Medicines Initiative

The Ghana Essential Medicines Initiative (GEMI) is a partnership between the Government of Ghana, American pharmaceutical companies, and impoverished rural communities. Its objective is to inform national policy recommendations on providing underserved populations with access to reproductive and child health care. The program will offer a sustainable, cost-exemption strategy to provide essential drugs along with maternal and child health education for mothers.

Community Health Officers provide health care with the help of a motorcycle . . .

As early as 1997, the Ghana Ministry of Health launched sector-wide health reforms aimed at improving access, equity, efficiency, quality, and sustainability of health and family planning services throughout Ghana. Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) has become a core component of this reform package by providing community health services in impoverished rural districts. This nationally scaled-up program posts nurses to communities where they provide basic curative and preventive health services. 

Recognizing that children under age 5 are vulnerable to acute respiratory infections, malaria, diarrheal diseases, and other sources of morbidity, the Government of Ghana declared a policy exempting children from all fees for essential medical care. However, while CHPS has been successful in addressing the problem of geographic inequity in access to health care, the program has introduced nonsustainable demand for the pharmaceuticals required to implement the government's fee-exemption policy.

GEMI will support an operations research initiative in rural Ghana to provide more equitable access to child and reproductive health services, including education for new mothers. The initiative will investigate solutions that offer clearly defined and sustainable policies for providing essential pharmaceuticals to remote communities in need as well as instruction for healthy deliveries and the care of newborns.

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Population Council researchers

Maya Vaughan-Smith, James F. Phillips, Barry Ravitch

Non-Council collaborators

John Koku Awoonor-Williams (Nkwanta Health Development Centre)

Frank Nyonator (Ghana Health Service)

Donors

Abbott Fund

Mascotte Family Fund of the Aspen Community Foundation

Wyeth

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Related Projects

• Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS)

• ExCHANGE: Expanding Community Healthcare Accessibility Network

• Scaling Up the Community-based Health Planning and Services Initiative in Nkwanta District

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