News & insights

Unitaid is a global health agency engaged in finding innovative solutions to prevent, diagnose and treat diseases more quickly, cheaply and effectively in low- and middle-income countries. One of the challenges to access to medicines is the existence of intellectual property rights (IPR) and patents that are enforceable across countries. The agency has been at the forefront of working through the IPR challenge, notably through its “game-changing” support for the creation and expansion of the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP). However, often MPP licenses do not include key middle-income countries, and as such in these countries the use of Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) flexibilities is the only remaining option. There are also instances where voluntary licenses have not been made available by originators, as such the promotion and implementation of TRIPS flexibilities remains a critical policy tool for addressing IP-related access barriers.

CEPA was engaged to evaluate three grants for a total of US$ 22 million, awarded in 2018, which form the TRIPS flexibility portfolio. The evaluation, which is presented by the OECD DAC evaluation criteria and the evaluation framework, has been published by Unitaid and is available to be downloaded.

The evaluation adopted a theory-based approach, which means that it is grounded on a theory of what the different grant activities of Unitaid’s investments in supporting TRIPS flexibilities were seeking to achieve, considering the pathways to impact represented through a portfolio-level theory of change that was developed for the evaluation.