News | Partnership with UNICEF Delivers the Goods
Our impact

Supporting Public Health

Our work helps to strengthen medical supply chains ensuring the timely delivery of critical goods
Trade Facilitation and Public Health

Making the Link

Access to medicines is fundamental to good health. Yet over two billion people – nearly one-third of humanity – continue to lack access to essential healthcare supplies.  

Governments working to keep their people healthy face many challenges, but avoidable delays in getting critical medical supplies across borders should not be among them.     Slow inspections, lack of facilities, and paper-based procedures can often deprive those in desperate need.  

This doesn’t have to happen. Trade facilitation cannot overcome every healthcare challenge, but it can contribute by identifying and unblocking border logjams, ensuring that critical health supplies reach their intended destinations faster and more cost-effectively.  

Streamlining processes can speed up delivery while helping regulatory authorities to protect people from falsified products. 

Trade facilitation cuts red tape and improves clearance procedures, ensuring that all legitimate goods, including healthcare supplies, clear borders as efficiently as possible.  Border reforms can strengthen medical supply chains, improve administrative efficiency, and contribute to building more robust healthcare systems. 

Access

Digitalising paper-based procedures contributes to quicker distribution of medical supplies to vulnerable populations.

Cost

Fewer delays at borders reduces storage fees and other overheads for importers, including aid organisations.

Consumer Safety

Modern risk management allows authorities to concentrate physical inspections on higher-risk shipments and to better combat fraud.
What We Do

How the Alliance Can Help

Alliance projects demonstrate consistently that introducing digitalisation and other best practices speed up border import clearance.  In Colombia, for instance, the Alliance supported the National Food and Drug Surveillance Institute (Invima) in rolling out a modern risk management system, enabling the agency to concentrate physical inspections on higher-risk shipments. And in Guatemala, automating documentation procedures for vessels arriving and departing the country’s four main ports is helping to streamline imports of pharmaceutical and related goods. 

In 2022, the Alliance and UNICEF collaborated in expediting clearance of humanitarian supplies in Mozambique. This has inspired both partners to extend and intensify their joint efforts into at least 10 more countries.