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Medicines Transparency Alliance

*** The website of the MeTA initiative can now be found here ***

These pages provides access to presentations, reports and tools relating to a series of consultations on the proposed multi-partner Medicines Transparency Alliance (MeTA).

MeTA will work through national and international partners (including DFID, the World Health Organization and Health Action International) to support national efforts to enhance transparency and build capacity in medicines policy, procurement and supply chain management. The added value of this initiative would entail explicit commitments from international actors in support of national efforts, coupled with focused technical and financial support to strengthen transparency and accountability. Such national efforts would seek to improve access to information about medicine quality, availability and pricing, with strong civil society and consumer involvement in scrutiny and debate.

MeTA will be launched as a global alliance in mid-2007, with pilots running in 4 countries. Possible activities could include:

• supporting countries to extract and collate data on medicine quality, availability and pricing along the supply chain;
• facilitating agreement by pharmaceutical companies (global and domestic) to disclose their own data on quality, availability and price and triangulating those with tender data;
• supporting countries to undertake studies assessing the level of transparency and good governance in medicines regulation and procurement;
• helping countries establish and maintain a multi-stakeholder working group or forum, engaging the public, private and non-profit sectors,
• working with countries to produce country-specific MeTA reports, which would bring data together and further analyse and contexualise issues related to quality, availability and price, and to disseminate these reports through the media and public interest groups;
• with support from a dedicated research ‘observatory’, developing and building awareness of guidelines and case studies on good practice, as appropriate and pooling information from different countries to build a global resource.

These early ideas will be refined further through detailed consultation with a range of Low Income Countries (LICs) and Lower Middle Income Countries (LMICs), and other stakeholders, during the first half of 2007.

Consultation meetings:

• Transparency and accountability in the supply of medicines: expert consultation meeting, 27 - February - 1 March
• Promoting transparency and accountability in the procurement and distribution of medicines, 13th March-14th March
• Country stakeholder meeting, 17 April
• First stakeholder meeting, 18 April

Key documents

• Towards a medicines transparency alliance: research priorities and mechanisms (report of initial meeting held in December 2006)
• Annex 1: Price, availability and affordability of medicines: international comparison in 30 countries, Richard Laing, WHO
• Annex 2: Towards a Medicines Transparency Alliance (MeTA), Daniel Graymore , DFID

Other documents

• Price components and access to medicines in Delhi, India