Building Health Supply Chain Resilience in a Crisis: Lessons from Nigeria

The USAID Global Health Supply Chain Program-Procurement and Supply project in Nigeria delivers lifesaving health commodities to the last mile. The project operates six warehouses, coordinates activities and engages third party logistics contractors for both warehousing and distribution value chain. During a nationwide peaceful protest in Nigeria in October 2020, hoodlums, under the guise of the “#EndSARS” protest, attacked and looted the axial warehouse in Calabar, Cross River State where donor funded health commodities were stored, carting away and destroying stock making it especially challenging for the project to deliver health commodities to the 1,450 health facilities supplied through the Calabar axial warehouse.

This case focuses on how the project successfully delivered health commodities to the 1,450 supported health facilities in the affected region amidst the covid19 pandemic.

The project adapted and deployed the USAID Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) framework in planning and implementing innovative strategies to deliver health commodities successfully to the affected regions. The CLA framework promotes sharing of evidence-based practices that enhances program efficiency, maximizing available resources within the GHSC-PSM project for continuous learning, feedback, reflection, and analysis of project implementation experience. The lessons are harnessed, documented and deployed to scale-up and replicate proven critical success factors.