In low- and middle-income countries, study after study finds that about 10-15% of the pharmaceutical products in the market do not meet quality standards. The problem is that pharmaceuticals are not like other products that people buy in stores. If a banana is rotten, it’s easy to see, smell, or feel the problem. But even a pharmacist or doctor cannot tell whether a medicine is good quality or not just by looking.
There are new technologies that can help to solve this problem. The goal of BoKoMo is to increase access to these technologies.
- PADs are paper analytical devices–a lab on paper that can identify substandard or falsified medicines.
- The PADreader is a free phone app that makes it easier for people to read the results of the PAD tests.
- DPAL–the Distributed Pharmaceutical Analysis Lab–is a consortium of universities and colleges that cooperate to analyze medicine quality.
- VERIFY is a sample tracking system that enables testers to easily store and share information about brands and batches of medicines, whether they are good quality or bad.
When a bad quality product is discovered in one location, it makes it harder for unscrupulous manufacturers or distributors to sell that product in other locations.
BoKoMo Foundation 