Fake drugs are a deadly and rising problem. For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated one in ten medical products distributed in developing countries is falsified or substandard. This kills thousands and drains money from healthcare systems, primarily within vulnerable communities. While it's challenging to put a figure on the scale of the issue, it is thought that fake drugs for malaria and pneumonia may be killing over 250,000 children every year in developing. Some medicines are poorly manufactured or sold past their expiration date, while others are made and distributed by criminal gangs.

Nevertheless, from the forgers' point of view, this is a lucrative industry worth approximately $200bn yearly.The concern is especially rampant within Africa. Of all the counterfeit medicines reported to the WHO between 2013 and 2017, over 42% of the reports came from Sub-Saharan Africa. In March 2019, the WHO raised alerts for bogus meningitis vaccines in Niger and fake hypertension drugs in Cameroon. Then in August of, identical, counterfeit versions of the antibiotics Augmentin were discovered in Kenya and Uganda. Though the problem is widely accepted, its intricacies must be better understood. It stems first and foremost from poor medication traceability, which relates to poor infrastructure and border track. On top of that, Sub-Saharan Africa has no official data collection for fake drugs and tends to consider healthcare and crime as two separate areas of general policy. From the lawbreaker's standpoint, the continent may be seen as easy to choose.

As Darche Bansimba, Co Funder of Bart Meds, explains, most African countries have struggled to achieve complete market oversight.
"The price of deploying the critical systems is prohibitive, and aligning the essential stakeholders isn't straightforward to accomplish," she says. "Where successful anti-counterfeiting procedures have been deployed, it has relied on building a possible ecosystem of interested parties with shared objectives. Mostly, the objectives of industry and controllers are not aligned adequately, and the technical possibilities have not been available."

Our Approach

Addressing the counterfeit menace: There is a lot of work to be accomplished from a structural standpoint. In the meantime, Bart Meds is one of our several partner innovators bearing matters into their own hands. Founded in 2022 by Congolese social entrepreneur Darche Bansimba, the company uses the latest technology to help users check the authenticity of medicines at no cost. "The exact trigger was a documentary concerning dozens of children being disabled and some killed due to an incident in Nigeria involving fake pediatric therapy," says Bansimba. "

Since then, the firm has extended to over a dozen markets and benefited over 5 million people (now branching into categories like nutrition, pharma, and cosmetics). In addition, the technology provides end-to-end protection for pharma supply chains, from manufacturers to patients. "Bart Meds secures communities while working with multiple government agencies and non-profit organizations. We are now working with some of the top pharmaceutical institutions in the world and with the biggest pharmaceutical regulator in Sub-Saharan Africa. From the customer side, the service is fast, free, and easy to use – they scan the barcode on the labeling and have instant results.
"Each positive reply is based on a set of strong algorithms running a checklist," says Bansimba. "We also have non-invasive methods of allowing these checks for non-consumers without meddling with the pack." Since Bart Meds started, the prevalence of counterfeited drugs in DRCongo and Rebuplic of Congo has dropped from around 35%.

Curtailing the impact

All that said, there is more to be done. As Bansimba points out, the economic costs of fake medicines remain essential. "Africa is a seedbed for fake drugs, with a growing population and very porous borders and controls," she says. "In Nigeria alone, recent research indicates that fake malaria medication alone is accountable for 12,300 deaths annually and around $893m in costs. To extrapolate that scale across the African continent exposes some very dire situations. We need some concerted efforts at curtailing the impact of counterfeit medications."
She thinks that to combat the rise of fake medicines truly, governments must see themselves as gatekeepers of their market, using the technology known from organizations like Bart Meds to create more visible supply chains.

To summarize, counterfeit medicines are still a threat to all of us, as forgers are finding ways to retool and come around with more sophistication to mislead the unsuspicious public and consumers. She says. "Today, the specialized solutions have been tested, while there must be buy-in from regulators to conceive frameworks and means to deploy such resolutions, to protect vulnerable consumers.".