AI IS STRENGTHENING AFRICAN HEALTH SUPPLY CHAINS

Artificial intelligence (AI) is strengthening African health supply chains and has the potential to have an even greater impact on driving improvements and saving lives. This is according to a new report launched at the 2026 SAPICS Conference, Africa’s leading event for the supply chain profession.

Developed with input from supply chain leaders, including the Gates Foundation, the Global Fund and the Global Financing Facility, the report was published by healthcare consulting firm Salient Advisory. Director Deji Ogunye shared its findings with the 600 supply chain professionals from around Africa and beyond who met in Cape Town for this year’s 48th annual SAPICS Conference, hosted by supply chain industry body SAPICS.

He reported that AI solutions are already addressing five of Africa’s seven most critical health supply chain bottlenecks, including demand forecasting, procurement, data management, decision-making from fragmented data, and inventory management.

Ogunye outlined specific impacts around Africa. In Ethiopia’s healthcare supply chain, USD38 million in planned procurement expenditure has been saved because of consumption-based, facility-level forecasting enabled by AI. Opian Technologies’ ForLab Plus platform, deployed by the Ministry of Health and the Ethiopian Pharmaceutical Supply Service across more than 5 700 public health facilities, is reported to have driven the reduction.

In Nigeria, an 87% reduction in document processing and manual review time for a Nigerian fourth-party logistics provider was achieved. This followed a small-scale pilot project led by the Global Fund with AI firm V7 Labs. It led to 960 hours saved and a drop in invoice-to-pay cycles from 13 days to 3 days.

In Kenya, procurement time per healthcare facility has been cut from three days to one hour thanks to AI-enabled SMArT tool, which was co-created by InSupply Health and the Ministry of Health.

In Morocco, AI technology has reduced stock levels at private pharmacies by 20% through improved planning.

With African health supply chains historically hindered by systemic, well-documented bottlenecks, these findings spotlight AI-powered solutions with real-world deployments that can potentially mitigate growing health supply chain management gaps caused by rapid declines in official development assistance. However, as AI rapidly evolves, the window for stakeholders to leverage these transformative technologies is narrowing, Ogunye warns.

“Early evidence suggests AI solutions are delivering measurable results in specific contexts, offering health systems a promising path to do more with less. But self-reported results from a limited number of deployments are not yet sufficient on their own to drive adoption at scale. What’s needed now is coordinated action, from credible impact evidence to policy frameworks, to move from isolated deployments to system-wide transformation,” he states.

Salient Advisory is calling for global health organisations to advocate for equitable and sustained access to AI infrastructure for African innovators, to invest in Africa-based AI capabilities and fund independent studies on the cost impact to help build the evidence base for broader adoption. Governments are urged to establish supply chain cost baselines before procuring AI solutions, develop AI policy frameworks, invest in internal technical capacity and update procurement processes to ensure AI outputs support effective supply chain planning.

With limited impact data on cost reduction, the firm is also urging solution providers to ground their business cases in verified, cost-linked impact data.

Ann Allen, senior programme officer at the Gates Foundation says that this report offers a valuable evidence base for how AI is already being applied to real supply chain challenges across the continent. “It flags the need for timely action to ensure promising AI innovations in Africa have equitable access to AI infrastructure. We look forward to continued collaboration with partners across the ecosystem to build on these early results.”

SAPICS president Thato Moloi comments: “Supply chains are the backbone of effective healthcare. SAPICS is proud to have provided a platform at our conference for the launch and sharing of this important research, bringing together the insights, expertise and partnerships needed to turn evidence into action. By sharing knowledge and enabling collaboration, we can help drive more resilient, efficient and responsive health supply chains across the continent.”