Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia will today, Wednesday, 22 December 2021, launch the nationwide e-Pharmacy platform.

It will take place at the Accra International Conference Centre.

The platform is meant to digitise the operations of pharmacies in the country.

It will help people access prescribed medicines conveniently and cost-effectively across the country.

It will also sieve out fake medicines.

The launch will make Ghana the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to have a national scale e-Pharmacy and one of the only few countries in the world to have it.

Explaining the rationale behind the initiative at a fireside conversation at Ashesi University on Tuesday, 2 November 2021, Dr Bawumia said: “Patients or people generally face difficulties when trying to find medicines in pharmacies”.

“They have no way of knowing which pharmacies have the medicines”, he noted.

“They could go to five pharmacies before getting lucky. Sometimes, patients are directed to go to specific pharmacies to buy the drug, denying them any advantage there might be of choosing from a lower-priced shop”.

“People also don’t know what the prices of the drugs are at different pharmacies and tend in their time of vulnerability to just buy at the prices offered when they find the drug. It is also difficult to tell whether the drugs are genuine or fake. There is also the problem of drug abuse with prescription drugs like tramadol.”

To address these problems, the Vice-president said in 2019, he challenged the Pharmaceutical Society of Ghana to digitise the operations of pharmacies in the country.