Responding to primary health needs in remote Sudan

Access to good quality healthcare is a challenge for many people in Sudan - a country with a population of almost 43 million people. In the last quarter of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021, IDA assembled over 600 Rapid Response Kits (RRKs) for one of our main customers, to specifically support primary healthcare needs in eight different remote locations in Sudan. With the supply of these kits, close to two million people will receive medical treatment. Each kit, containing sixty quality-assured essential medicines and fifteen medical supplies, can cover the needs of around 3.000 people for about three months. These kits create standardisation in healthcare delivery, resulting in efficient packing and delivery of medicines and medical goods, so that health care providers can be confident they will receive the right medicines and medical products to treat specific conditions.

Kitting hub Dubai

The composition and logistics of kits can be a complex process. For example, to produce the 600 RRKs for this project, IDA Foundation sourced the kit contents from close to fourty different IDA quality-assured suppliers in a number of different countries. IDA's kitting facility is strategically located in Dubai, at the crossroad between Asia, Africa and Europe, and close to both air- and sea-port. This ensures fast shipments to any location, especially during emergency response. It is also close to the International Humanitarian City, a logistics centre for the distribution of humanitarian aid, where major international NGO’s, UN organisations and intergovernmental organisations are based to quickly respond to global crises.

Aside from a large kit production capacity, our partner facility is also equipped to stock large numbers of kit components and kits, allowing us to not only respond quickly in the event of an emergency, but also to produce (non-emergency) custom-made kits for our customers.

During the project we worked closely together with our customer to find the best logistical option for each of these eight challenging end destinations, but in the end the customer got the opportunity to consolidate all the shipments. We were able to quickly facilitate this last-minute operation and handed over the goods to our customer's IHC warehouse in Dubai in the past few days.

Find more information on our kits and kitting process here.