CfP presents at TICTeC

Tackling illegal pharmacies by digitistising the license registration system

Last year, TICTeC, or “The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference,” the world’s only conference dedicated to exploring how civic technologies are impacting citizens, was to be held in Reykjavik, Iceland, but was forced to move online as the COVID-19 pandemic worsened. This year, MySociety is modifying the format further, organising TICTeC as a series of online Show and Tells, from March to May 2021.

The format of the conference is simple; each speaker is allotted seven minutes to share their organisation’s in-depth research and lessons learnt related to the impacts of civic technology. These sessions are called, “Show and Tells”.

The first of these, titled, “Scrutiny, oversight and the data that makes it possible,” took place, coincidentally on March 23, Pakistan Day, and Ibraheem Saleem (Program Manager KP Fellowship) represented Code for Pakistan to talk about CfP’s work with the KP government to tackle illicit pharmacies and stopping the sale of counterfeit medicines, through civic tech and digitisation.

In May of 2020 the KP Fellowship Team received a request from the Health Department KP to help digitise and automate the pharmaceutical license registration, renewal and verification processes.

A team of Fellows from the 6th Cycle of the KP Government Innovation Fellowship Program worked with the Health Dept KP to develop this system. (The annual six-month Fellowship Program is run by Code for Pakistan, in partnership with the KP IT Board and the World Bank.)

A team of three Fellows (Muhammad Awais Khan, Asfandiyar and Abbas Khan) were assigned to the department to develop a digital system for pharmaceutical license registration to address the challenges faced by the department as well as the drug store owners.

The Fellows developed a fully centralized online platform to digitise the entire process for license application, renewal and verification for pharmacies across the KP province. This system helps the Health Dept track fake and illegal licenses, and also makes it simpler for pharmacy owners to apply for and renew licenses.

Since its launch in January 2021, the online system has digitised over 15,000 records of qualified persons. Some records dated back to the 1970s and this exercise of digitisation also helped with the reverification of these old records. Moreover consumers are now empowered to check the authenticity of the license by scanning the QR code of the license displayed in a pharmacy. For applicants, the time to acquire the license has also been reduced from one month to 10 days. Over 20 government officials have also been trained to perform a detailed on-premise assessment of pharmacies before awarding a license. Since the Fellowship team developed this system using open source tools and technologies the maintenance cost of this system is significantly less compared to proprietary solutions enabling the department to sustain the solution in the long term.

Other speakers at the first Show and Tell included:

• 360Giving — Find that Charity: a tool to help find charities and improve charity data (David Kane)
• Open Contracting Partnership — How to monitor emergency procurement with open data: lessons from 12 countries (Camila Salazar)
• Integrity Action — Civic tech for smartphone beginners: is the future binary? (Arran Leonard)
• Open Data Barometer LAC & ILDA — Keeping track of open data in times of political change (David Zamora and Silvana Fumega)
• AfricanLII and Indigo Trust — How AfricanLII saves its users $100million a year (Amy Sinclair and Paul Lenz)

A full recording of the session is available here.

The next TICTeC Show and Tell will take place on April 20 and will conclude with a third and final Show and Tell on May 25.

TICTeC is an initiative of MySociety, an NGO based in the UK, and is the world’s only conference dedicated to exploring how civic technologies are impacting citizens. The conference attracts academics from leading universities such as Harvad, Oxford, Cambridge and MIT; tech giants such as Microsoft, Facebook and Google, and inter-governmental bodies, the UN, the World Bank, and international NGOs.

Written by Ammar Rehmani

Ammar is the Storytelling & Outreach Manager at Code for Pakistan.