Counterfeit medicines are a global problem that has worsened as supply chains become more complex and electronic commerce expands. The World Health Organization (WHO) has deployed a global counterfeit detection program (WHO Global Surveillance and Monitoring System for substandard and falsified medical products 2018) and documented 1500 cases in 4 years, most of them in Asia and Africa. The program determined that the main cause of the failure to detect substandard quality drugs  was the lack of infrastructure and qualified personnel. If we consider the diseases that cause the most deaths in Africa are AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, ensuring the quality of the medicines used for these pathologies is crucial for the health of the population and the development of these countries.

The project will select  he drugs marketed in Europe and Africa for the treatment of the indicated diseases that would serve as a reference to establish pharmaceutical equivalences and verify compliance with quality requirements and specifications.

Different analytical and compendial methods will be developed for the determination of purity, composition, contaminants and for the verification of compliance with the pharmacopoeia requirements.

The viability of these actions will be possible thanks to the equipments and facilities available in the laboratories involved and that will be completed with the project funds. In addition, sampling plans will be designed at critical points to detect substandars.

The laboratories of the IUETSPC and the LNCQM will see their equipment and their capacities improved by the qualification of the personnel involved. The first will be a single laboratory and reference in the MAC area for this type of action that could be used as support for this kind of  action at the region. In addition, Mauritania would have a laboratory completed ready to initiate a qualification process.

The health of the population, in general, it would be improved, especially that of patients with these pathologies, since substandard drugs would be identified, the critical points where they are most frequent and, therefore, the effectiveness of treatments would be improved.