New global development alliance with USAID through 2026

Based on the success of the Project Last Mile partnership, USAID announced a new global development alliance to extend its commitment to Project Last Mile for a further five years until 2026. USAID’s commitment will enable Project Last Mile to increase its route-to-market, cold chain, and strategic marketing programming in 12 countries across Africa.

Sierra Leone
Working with USAID, the Ministry of Health and Sanitation, and the National Medical Supply Agency (NMSA), Project Last Mile tested a digital last mile model to strengthen supply of family planning and essential medicine commodities. The integrated digital last mile model improved reporting rates and reduced stockouts by up to 48% – a greater reduction than in districts implementing only the digital inventory management intervention. USAID and NMSA are considering implementing the integrated digital last mile model in four additional districts in 2022.

Cote d’Ivoire
Project Last Mile kicked off programming in its twelfth country, launching a new last mile delivery project with PEPFAR and USAID. The program will apply the Coca-Cola system’s route-to-market principles to develop and pilot a redesigned last mile distribution model to reduce HIV product stockouts at last mile health facilities.

Uganda and Ghana
Project Last Mile is leveraging the Coca-Cola system’s route-to-market best practices to support health enterprise development in Uganda and Ghana. Project Last Mile is working with two social enterprises to strengthen market-based approaches to improve the availability of family planning products and services across Africa. Support includes providing technical advisory, coaching, mentoring support, and visits to Coca-Cola bottling plants to enable skills transfer on best practices.

Mozambique
Project Last Mile completed the second phase of work in a long-standing partnership with the Central Medical Stores (CMAM) to strengthen last mile service delivery by supporting routing optimization, outsourced distribution, and overall information technology systems capability. Project Last Mile launched a new partnership with the National AIDS Council to test an integrated supply and demand model to drive uptake of condoms at access points outside the public health sector.

South Africa
Working with USAID and the National Department of Health (NDoH), Project Last Mile continued its support to strengthen distribution of chronic medication, reaching over 4.7 million patients. Project Last Mile scaled two national behavior change campaigns to improve uptake of HIV services, with initial results suggesting improved HIV testing and treatment outcomes across targeted population segments.