The governance and workforce development (G&WD) framework is a set of principles and processes supplemented with tools and resources to support Global Fund staff to approach supply chain (SC) transformation from a human resources perspective. The framework is intended to support Global Fund staff to holistically design and plan the workforce development investments required for and often requested by countries.

For programs, governments and projects interested in implementing a pre-service training (PST) for the supply chain management of health commodities, this guide provides general information about the process, stages, steps, and activities required to initiate a successful PST program. The strategy outlined in this guide is based on experiences with PST by the USAID | DELIVER PROJECT and other projects implemented by John Snow, Inc. (JSI), in a variety of countries, including Benin, Bolivia, Morocco, Malawi, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Zambia.

The USAID | DELIVER PROJECT has developed a short training module that introduces the basics of performance-based incentive (PBI) schemes for the public health supply chain. You can use the module to train yourself or others on implementing performance incentives to strengthen supply chains.

The Capacity Plus partnership has developed this human resources management (HRM) assessment approach to guide policy-makers, managers and human resources (HR) practitioners toward better understanding and responding to HRM challenges facing their health systems.

Outsourcing has historically been provided by public employees and has been done so with a largely consistent rationale: that applying market mechanisms and private sector expertise to the work of governments can increase efficiencies, ensure that more products reach the patients and ultimately improve the effectiveness of the entire health supply chain. However, for governments (ministries of health, central medical stores, vaccine stores and supply chain agencies) to outsource their supply chain services, they need to have the internal human resource capacity to effectively manage these outsourced activities.

The outsourcing toolkit comprises three resources that have been designed to complement one another and is intended to support governments and national supply chain organisations to successfully outsource from a “people” perspective.

Centring on the outsourcing roadmap, the toolkit allows users to assess the maturity of their supply chain and their current people practices, and defines the steps to be taken before outsourcing can be adopted. The roadmap builds on PtD’s maturity model for human resources in supple chain management, Kotter’s 8-step process for leading change, and is informed by interviews with health supply chain managers in Africa.

The jointly coordinated STEP programme, also known as STEP 2.0, is a professional development tool that is specifically tailored to the needs of health supply chain leaders and managers. Crucially, it blends elements of self-paced learning, facilitator-led training, on-the-job application of leadership skills and coaching support. What makes it particularly unique is that it pairs public sector supply chain managers – the delegates – with private sector supply experts – the coaches.

The COVID-19 pandemic puts increasing pressure on health supply chains. Preventing, detecting and responding to shortages of health products poses a significant challenge. The movement of goods across the global supply chain (SC) has been disrupted due to restrictions on movement (air, sea and land) and the operating environment has become increasingly complex. Health supply chain staff are doing their best to maintain the availability of critical supplies despite these hardships and are an essential part of COVID-19 response efforts. For the health supply chain workforce to safely procure and deliver supplies they must be given the same protections as all essential workers.

The purpose of this package is to set standard policies and practices to ensure fairness and equity, attract and retain a qualified and committed supply chain workforce and to clearly show the rights and responsibilities of the health supply chain workforce This standard is meant to be used as either a guideline for health supply chain organisations that do not yet have a HR policy manual or that do and wish to update and ensure that it contains best practices. Therefore, this document shall be used as a reference tool when developing, revising or updating HR policy manuals.

This report is the first of its kind to look at training evaluation within the public health supply chain. It emerged from an expressed need by the PtD Board to improve the evaluation of training and development activities with less reliance on training intervention outputs (i.e. the number of individuals trained), towards documenting the outcomes and impacts of training activities leading to improvement in health service delivery.

This white paper proposes goals, an approach, activities and a call to action that aim to engage key stakeholders in a harmonised effort to professionalise public health supply chain management, by emphasising a cultural shift in international notions of public health supply chains, institutional shifts in prioritisation of and requirements for supply chain manager positions, and individual opportunities for professional education and networking.