Azuka Okeke is the CEO of Africa Resource Centre for Excellence in Supply Chain Management (ARC_ESM.) She oversees supply chain transformation projects in Nigeria and has also supported other African countries in strengthening their health systems. She is best known for her expertise in engaging governments and development partners, supporting them to prioritise and invest in health supply chain programmes in Africa.
Her work has improved financial investments by the federal and state governments in Nigeria and co-investments worth over $12,000,000 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Global Fund, and GAVI. Azuka is well known for the role she plays as a ‘Thought Partner’ and advisor to National Ministries of Health in Africa. Beyond government engagements, she has successfully facilitated public-private partnerships for innovative health financing through platforms such as the World Economic Forum and recently ARC.
Currently, she has pioneered the set-up of a first-of-its-kind membership platform for the private sector in Nigeria through which private corporates and individual experts have contributed about $700,000 to public health programmes within the past four years.
Her ambition is to provide governments and partners with a pragmatic framework for sustainability and country ownership for supply chain delivery. Her most recent aspiration is to advocate for human capital development in Africa and champion a collaboration with MIT Boston, Zaragoza Logistics Centre, Spain, and six local universities in Nigeria to set up a Pan-African centre of excellence for supply chain management. Azuka is extraordinarily talented in coordinating and managing high-performing teams to deliver quality sustainable programmes and is a proud Canon Collins Scholarship recipient (2011- 2013), Commonwealth Scholar (2013), and member of the West African Postgraduate College of Pharmacists. She has served on the Board of Directors for ARC in South Africa and is now an executive director for ARC_ESM. She also serves globally as a programme committee member for the Global Health Supply Chain Summit.
As former Partnership Lead, Private Sector Health Alliance of Nigeria, she was in charge of the PHN’s membership platform, engaging the private corporate sector to facilitate their involvement in public health care delivery. She helped set up platforms to showcase private sector offerings to the public sector to broker partnerships. The partnership supports governments to develop PPPs with the private sector, providing guidance on developing MoUs and contracts for formalising relationships. It also creates a platform for strategic CSR from the private sector to governments’ public health financing.
