The Daily Tell

As part of a project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business has entered into a partnership and provided the UK-based organization Riders for Health (RFH) a grant to help improve methods of medical and health care transportation methods in Africa.

The grant will be utilized by RFH to both demonstrate and evaluate the impact that having viable transportation has on the continent’s health systems as Stanford’s Global Supply Chain Management Forum oversees the plan’s logistics. Through the research RFH is hoping to show how increased mobility through Africa’s skilled health care workers can result in increases in their productivity, efficiency, and coverage of "key health care interventions."

"For years, Riders for Health has been an effective logistics arm, serving as the last mile for health care delivery in Africa. We are very privileged to be partnering with them to make use of supply chain and logistics advances to scale up their operations," Said Hau Lee, the Director of the Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum at. "We are pleased that Riders’ grant from the Gates Foundation means that we can support Riders to save lives, while at the same time pushing the research frontier on the important subject of health delivery logistics,"

According to its website, RFH was established as an independent non-governmental organization in 1996 in the UK that currently has programs in Gambia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania, and Lesotho.

Barry Coleman, the co-founder and executive director of Riders for Health, added that increased mobilization would make it easier for immunization programs to be carried out and that the program’s efforts had "the potential to transform the delivery of health care across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa."