To guide their efforts to build population health by strengthening public-sector logistics systems (or supply chains), health planners in Africa can use the evolutionary path or roadmap suggested by McCord and Olson1, which describes a transformation process composed of 4 phases (Box). Using this roadmap, health planners may choose the integrated phase as their endpoint. Unfortunately, doing so does not tap the benefits that multiplicity offers in reducing the risk of dependency on a single logistics pipeline and the benefits that competition offers in reducing the number of societal resources spent on ensuring health commodity security.2

Supply Chain Evolutionary Roadmap for Health Planners in Africa

The ad hoc phase is characterized by unstructured, ill-defined, …