You walk into a pharmacy. You buy some medicines. How do you know they are genuine? Not just some sugar pills or syrup but the antibiotic your doctor prescribed? As the third largest exporter of pharmaceuticals, much of it to Africa, India has a strategic interest in securing its international and domestic supply. And in this space, it has something to learn from the African experience.

According to the World He­alth Organization (WHO), on­e-fourth of the medicines in developing country markets are spurious. Globally, these fake medicines fetch counterfeiters anywhere between $32 billion and $75 billion, according to wide-ranging estimates by WHO and the US-based Center for Medicines in the Public Interest (CMPI), respectively. Directly or indirectly, they also kill, by some estimates, 2000 people a day.

If anything, fake drugs are a big and deadly business. No one knows for sure, how big. No one knew quite how to stop it.

Then the mobile revolution took hold of Africa. During 2004-2005, Bright Simons of Ghana invented a simple fra­mework for certification in the agricultural sector. In 2007, Ashifi Gogo, another Ghanaian and Nathan Sigworth of the US, joined forces with Simons to develop the model further and apply it to pharmaceuticals. Mobile authentication of drugs was born. The first implementation was in Ghana by mPedigree, founded by Simons. Like many powerful ideas, the essence of mobile authentication is simple.

You buy a drug. You scratch off to reveal a unique code (or the code is already visible). You SMS the code. Instantly, a return SMS informs you whether the dr­ug is authentic. That is po­wer in the hands of the consumer. The backend, of course, is marked by considerable innovation, competition and em­erging partnerships vying for a piece of the global market to secure pharmaceuticals.

Simons, Gogo and Sigwo­rth, who collaborated earlier on developing the first Mobile Product Authentication (MPA) system for pharmaceuticals, are now competitors. Each fo­unded a different company — mPedigree, Sproxil and PharmaSecure, respectively — and are pursuing a different business model in a different geography. Commenting on how mPedigree is different from the other two, Simons replied by email, “MPedigree is a social enterprise. It is committed that consumers be able to access the service for free everywhere in the world and that the price of medicines should not increase as a result of the pharmaceutical industry’s ad­o­ption of this technology.

This requires that it dedicates its energies to the forging of deep and broad alliances globally with the world’s leading infrastructure companies, intergovernmental organisations, and other socially-focu­sed organisatio­ns. It does not aim at quick commercial returns at the expense of the strategic considerations that would tr­uly tra­nsform the counterfeit medicines situation globally.” MPe­d­igree’s tec­h­nology, now in partnership with Hewlett-Packard, is deployed at present in Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya, with active pilots in Tanzania, Uganda and Ca­me­roun. As a part of its foray into India, Simons added that mPedigree has developed relationships with “th­ree of the top telcos in the market as well as with one of the three main pharmaceutical industry associations.” But he confe­s­sed that India has proven to be a rather complex market that he hopes to crack by 2012.

PharmaSecure, it seems, has cracked the domestic drug market in India through its efforts over the past four years. Sigworth and co-founder Taylor Thompson work closely with pharmaceutical companies, tel­ecom providers, the government, industry associations and consumers. “We ha­ve implemented orders to protect more than 1 billion doses of medicine on the Indian market,” said Sigworth in an email. Most of PharmaSecure’s auth­entic­at­ion codes, rather than being printed labels placed onto the drugs post-producti­on, are ha­rdwired directly into the manufacturing process. By embedding codes at the point of manufacturing, PharmaSecure is able to achieve scale and even secure, for instance, low-cost, Rs 10, life-saving TB dr­ugs. “Our business models are dif­ferent but our end goals are to save lives,” stressed Thompson.

The government of India recently mandated that all drugs for export and domestic consumption should have a unique serial number. Sim­o­ns and Sigworth both support this move in policy, seeing it as an important step in authentication. It is also the direction in which several countries are moving. However, they would not hazard a guess as to how long it might take to secure India’s domestic and export-oriented drug industry.

The SMS-based drug authentication solution matured in Africa, at the confluence of a massive problem, fake dru­gs, and a distinctly new opportunity offered by mobile telephony. “Africa was the first market where the general public involvement in medicine authentication became commonplace due to the activities of grassroots innovators,” Simons said.

This African seed is sp­reading to India and other parts of the developing world and in the process, being innovated up­on further by the creativity and dynamism of social entrepreneurs.

(The writer is a social entrepreneur and is on the faculty of IIM-Ahmedabad)