OSI's International Palliative Care Initiative provided support to the African Palliative Care Association (APCA) to complete a three-day workshop on access to medicines in Southern Africa. The workshop, Advocacy for Palliative Care in Africa: A Focus on Essential Pain Medication Accessibility in Southern Africa, was held on February 27-29 in Windhoek Namibia with funding from USAID's Regional HIV/AIDS Program.

The workshop drew participants from Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. The teams from each of these countries included participants who were willing to advocate for policies that make palliative care and essential medicines, including opioids, available and accessible in their respective countries. Each country developed individual country strategies for how to improve access to essential medicines for palliative care. APCA will provide the participants with follow-up support for implementation of these strategies.

This was the third in a series of workshops addressing such issues. The previous two workshops addressed East Africa in Entebbe in 2006, and West Africa in Ghana in 2007.