Project Summary:
Pooled procurement is increasingly recognized as a strategic approach for improving healthcare supply chains by reducing costs, enhancing access to quality health commodities, and leveraging economies of scale. While developed countries have benefited significantly from pooled procurement, its adoption in Africa is limited by governance gaps, operational inefficiencies, and funding challenges. These barriers are further worsened by insufficient research on how pooled procurement models function across diverse healthcare supply chains.

Through this PhD project, Marco N. Masala seeks to address these gaps by developing practical, evidence-based solutions to strengthen pooled procurement in African healthcare supply chains. The study will focus on analyzing stakeholder dynamics, identifying key barriers and enablers, exploring suitable funding mechanisms, and assessing pooled procurement models. Each paper will employ distinct methodologies including literature reviews, interviews, the Delphi method, and the World Café technique tailored to the specific research questions, to ensure that the findings are comprehensive, relevant, and actionable.

The study aims to categorize stakeholders into primary and secondary groups based on their power, interest, motivation, and influence to guide targeted engagement plan for meaningful collaboration. Additionally, the research will map key strategic and operational barriers across healthcare supply chain tiers, identify both foundational enablers for the initial adoption of pooled procurement and evolutionary enablers to address long-term challenges, propose robust funding mechanisms and pooled procurement models designed to support sustainable implementation in the African context. Where necessary, hybrid models will be developed to align with local healthcare supply chains, ensuring long-term sustainability, operational effectiveness, and value for money.

This project is a collaborative effort between the University of Twente (Netherlands) and the University of Rwanda.