Unicef’s life-saving drugs donated by West re-sold by government in Sierra Leone
By Seamus Mirodan in Freetown and Sebastien Berger
Last Updated: 2:28PM GMT 26 Nov 2008
The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), which receives funding from British taxpayers, supplies essential drugs and mosquito nets to the government in Freetown. The aid is supposed to be distributed free of charge by the authorities, but has been discovered on sale in private pharmacies across the country, according to an investigation for BBC1’s Panorama programme.
The sellers are said to be shopkeepers with no qualifications as pharmacists, and the buyers often poor families who should be receiving them anyway from the authorities.
In Sierra Leone, ranked bottom in the UN Human Development Index, more children will die before reaching their fifth birthday than anywhere else on earth. There are only three fully qualified paediatricians in the country.
Mohammed Barrie is a trainee paediatrician and one of only five medical graduates who qualified in his year to stay and work in the country. He is working alongside Unicef in Sierra Leone’s child survival intervention programme in the diamond-rich province of Kono. Despite its resource wealth and with its war-torn past it is home to some of the country’s poorest families and most vulnerable HIV-positive children, for whom Unicef is supplying cotrimoxazole, an anti-bacterial medicine used to boost their immune systems.
“I would say that out of the 100 pharmacies we have here in Kono as many as 98 are selling Unicef drugs illegally,” said Dr Barrie.
“It’s a very serious problem because this one of the country’s poorest and most war-torn areas. Children from Kono are some of the most vulnerable in Sierra Leone.”
In six out of seven pharmacies the programme-makers were able to buy bottles of Unicef-supplied cotrimoxazole, and when confronted some of the owners even admitted they had bought the drugs from government stores and hospitals.
“Do you have the Unicef drugs?” one shopkeeper was asked. “Yes we have this one,” he replied. “Three thousand leones.”
The sum is only about 70p, but poverty in the area is so dire that some parents have to go without food for two days to pay for the drugs.
Asked why the medicines were being sold when they were meant to be free, another shopkeeper said: “We are not supposed to sell them, that’s what the constitution says. The reason why we’re selling them is that the government is selling them to us. We’re getting them from the government.”
Read full article at Telegraph.co.uk
