Supply chain industry body SAPICS has announced a partnership with a new education affiliate that will build skills and capacity in healthcare supply chains across Africa, to ensure access to essential medicines.

Lives depend on effective healthcare supply chains, but in many African countries, these are being jeopardised by a skills gap. SAPICS’s Beverley de Sousa explains that role players like pharmacists must often take on the job of supply chain planning, including understanding minimum order quantities, demand signals and planning and inventory management. “This is in addition to their core clinical duties. Without proper training, these added responsibilities can lead to inefficiencies, wastage and medicine stockouts that put lives at risk. SAPICS’s new partnership with global learning and networking platform Bee Skilled directly addresses that challenge by upskilling the health workforce and advancing the professionalisation of supply chain roles within the health sector,” she states.

SAPICS has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Bee Skilled. Through this partnership, SAPICS will offer accessible, affordable and fully online training tailored to the unique needs of the healthcare sector. The cornerstone of this collaboration is the Collective Learning Certificate (CLC) Course: Supply Chain for Health. There are two certificate options in the programme. Certificate 1 covers the Core Functions of the Supply Chain, with modules on supply chain governance, inventory management, demand forecasting, and warehousing and transportation. Certificate 2 focuses on Supply Chain Enabling Functions, including enabling elements for the supply chain, building resilience in health supply chains and managing the performance of a health supply chain. Both certificates are eight-week, self-paced courses designed specifically for pharmacists, nurses, lab technologists, technicians and other frontline health workers. The programmes combine internationally recognised supply chain competencies with a strong public health context, equipping professionals with the tools they need to strengthen health systems.

De Sousa notes that the CLC: Supply Chain for Health course is mobile-friendly and fully online, making it accessible to professionals across urban and rural settings. More than 450 healthcare professionals across Africa have completed the course to date and more than 600 learners are currently enrolled and learning.

According to Sanjay Saha, CEO of Bee Skilled, the collaboration with SAPICS has come at the right time, when there is a strong need for countries in Africa to sustainably invest in their supply chain workforce to reduce the technical dependency on donors and various partners. “Our main objective is to make supply chain education and professional development accessible for health professionals in South Africa and across the continent,” he states.

This partnership reflects SAPICS’s commitment to building stronger, more resilient health systems by ensuring that healthcare professionals have the skills and support they need. By bringing practical, accessible supply chain education into the healthcare sector, SAPICS and Bee Skilled are working to ensure that essential medicines and health products reach the patients who need them, consistently and without delay.

As an introductory offer to this new education programme, South African health professionals can enrol and complete the CLC 1: Supply Chain for Health for free. Thereafter, they have the option to move on to the more advanced CLC 2: Supply Chain for Health and obtain CPD (Continuous Professional Development) points.