The problem
Ethiopia's facility-level supply planning ran on emailed spreadsheets and informal follow-up. Facility pharmacists forecast their quarterly need, regional coordinators chased submissions by phone and email, and the national picture emerged slowly from manual reconciliation in Addis Ababa. There was also an information asymmetry: national planners and facilities were not looking at the same numbers at the same time. Facilities submitted data into a process they couldn't see into, and central decisions came back without the underlying picture. Bottom-up demand — the foundation any supply plan should rest on — was the hardest thing in the system to actually see.
What we built
ForLab+ put facility staff, regional coordinators, and national planners in one system with one set of numbers. Facilities submit quarterly demand directly; validation happens at entry; regional teams see submissions as they arrive and query them in place; national planners aggregate a picture they can trust. The design principle was alignment: follow the ministry's existing quarterly planning process rather than replace it, so that using the system requires no new theory of operations — and very little training.
What changed
The rollout outgrew its own plan. The planned pilot was 15 facilities; today 5,100+ public health facilities are onboarded — including remote and conflict-affected sites — with close to 7,000 users doing quarterly supply planning in the system. From Opian's implementation evidence: - 5,100+ facilities onboarded against a planned pilot of 15. - Roughly 28 billion Birr in demand captured through the platform. - National-level participation, with a quarterly forecasting cycle institutionalized. - High adoption achieved without heavy training, because the system aligns with existing workflows. Bottom-up, facility-level demand is now established as the foundation for national supply planning — which is what makes the data-quality and budget-gap findings in our other case studies possible at all.
"The planned pilot was 15 facilities. Adoption carried it to 5,100+."