IMANI’s Executive Director, Franklin Cudjoe and Former Deputy Director of Food and Drugs Board, Mr Kwamina Van Ess, met with Ghana’s Health Minister to discuss health issues.

The discussion focused on Ghana’s position on the WHO’s Inter Governmental Working Group on Intellectual Property as it relates to development of medicines and progression of the National Alcohol Policy work IMANI initiated.

The discussions with the Ghanaian Minister of Health on Ghana’s position, revealed a rare sensible position – that breaking patents have the effect of weakening Africa’s ability to protect its medical breakthroughs in the future.

The Ghanaian Health Minister understands that while differential pricing of medicines will be a good way out for Africa, he knows patents are just a part of the solution- weak healthcare infrastructure, inadequate health insurance schemes, inadequate health professionals, price controls, taxes and tariffs on medicines (almost 30% in the case of Ghana) and corruption are the real barriers to health care in Africa.

Refreshingly, his position was at variance with the African Group position in the IGWG, which is blindly being led by Kenya championing the overly rehearsed chorus that patents put profits before people.

But his is a lone voice.

Two and a half months earlier, IMANI convened the first workshop that brought alcoholic beverage manufacturers and sector regulator, the Food and Drugs Board together to lay the groundwork for what should be in a national alcohol policy.

The meeting was fruitful, as both Industry and the FDB, were later to use “co-regulation”, a negotiating tool coined from the deliberations and applied successfully to solve the misunderstanding over the temporary advertisement ban on alcoholic beverages.

However, there was plenty of work to be done. We did realise that a national policy should reflect the entirety of society.

So, our November 29, 2007 workshop included representatives from Health, Education, Licensing, Trade, Finance, Police, Justice, Community associations, NGOs, Church groups, advertising industry, youth organizations and the Media. Their insights were very crucial to a successful outcome.

Our facilitator for the workshop was the internationally renowned Alcohol and Drugs expert Dr. Keith

A Presentation on “How an Alcohol Policy could affect Trade and Revenue for the State” was made by the Deputy Minister for Trade, Private Sector and PSI

A Presentation on “How an Alcohol Policy can help mitigate abuse of alcoholic beverages” by the Deputy CEO of the Food and Drugs Board, Reverend Dr. Martey.

There were break away groups with assigned duties on what each group wanted featured in an alcohol policy. The recommendations of the six groups were collected in the first draft of the alcohol policy.