When you go to the pharmacy to pick up your prescription, I'm sure you feel pretty much assured that the drugs you're getting are the real deal. Not so in many parts of the world. Fake pharmaceuticals are a big, and deadly, business. The UN estimates the worldwide trade in fake pharmaceuticals to be upwards of $500 billion. Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in the developing world, die each year because they don’t get the medication they thought they were getting. The trade is particularly bad in fake anti-malarials, and fake HIV/AIDS drugs.
But what if there were an easy, free way for those buying the medications to validate their authenticity? And what if that system used a tool that most people in the developing world had close to hand — a cell phone? Well, that’s where a company called Sproxil comes in. Sproxil's idea is to provide a scratch-off authentication label attached to medication. At the point of sale, a customer can send a free text message via short-code to a number provided on the label. And in just seconds, they’ll receive a message back either authenticating the drug, or warning the consumer that it is not genuine.
Sproxil is the brainchild of Ashifi Gogo, a young Ghanaian who is not only running the company, but also finishing his PhD in Engineering at Dartmouth. "I don't sleep much," Gogo joked when I asked him how he finds the time to do it all. Sproxil actually grew out of another entrepreneurial idea he had a few years back: to put bar codes on foods that would provide certification when scanned at check-outs that said products were truly organic.
When that market didn't pan out, Gogo turned back to West Africa, and the problem of fake drugs. Currently, Sproxil is being trialed in Nigeria, a place notorious for trade in fake drugs. Scratch off labels with a free text message short-code are attached to a diabetes medication called Glucophage.
"We're doing a million sachets of the product across the nation," Gogo says. Is it working? Well, Gogo tells me that pharmacists are noticing that consumers are now insisting on buying only those sachets with scratch-off labels. Old stock is sitting on the shelves.
For my money, the real brilliance of this idea is that Sproxil's using the technology that's already in the hands of millions of people in the developing world: the cell phone.
"There's no device investment required," says Gogo. "These cell phones are available everywhere, and because we're using text messaging -- a feature available on all these phones -- there's no need for anyone to have a data connection, or download an app, or install anything. Also, people there are used to scratching and texting to redeem airtime vouchers to charge up minutes on their cell phone. So, we decided to adopt that approach for consumers of pharmaceuticals."
Gogo says Sproxil is also looking to target markets for anti-malarials and HIV/AIDS drugs. But it's not just medication that he's got his eye on. Counterfeit education certificates are also a problem that he says Sproxil's method could tackle, not to mention the huge trade in counterfeit CDs and DVDs, and even fake cell phones.
Think about it: buying a cell phone, then scratching off a label and using a cell phone (possibly a fake one) to text in and find out whether the cell phone you just bought is a real one. Whoah.
(Screen grab from Sproxil's website)
Tags: Cell Phones, DoGooding
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