About us

The mSupply Foundation is a not-for-profit trust, registered under the laws of New Zealand.

We want to do as much good in the world as we can by producing, maintaining great health supply chain software.

We have 20 years experience in this field working with Sustainable Solutions’ mSupply software. We are currently rebuilding mSupply as an open source project.

Our full principles and purpose are below.

The mSupply Foundation's Principles and Purpose

MĀTĀPONO/PRINCIPLES

The Trust is committed, in attaining its purposes, to:

1. Working out of our ethic of love for others.
2. Seeking to serve the developing world, as this is where the needs are greatest.
3. Developing our staff and the people we work with so they can thrive and serve their local and wider community.
4. Respecting and implementing the dual heritage of the partners of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi).
5. Acknowledging that we are guests in the countries where we work. We will respect their cultures and ways of working. We will seek to develop systems and people that encourage local autonomy, local governance, and the sustainability of local initiatives.
6. Be mindful that our work and lives are sustained by the world’s resources and ecosystems. We will act with care in our use of them, and seek to find ways to minimise the use of scarce resources by ourselves and by those we work with.

WHĀINGA/ PURPOSE

The purpose of the Trust will be to do as much good in the world as it possibly can. Its chosen area of service is to develop and implement systems that improve people’s health in the developing world. In particular the Trust will:

1. Develop and implement software for health supply chains and other health systems as the Trust deems necessary.
2. We seek to partner with in-country organisations to grow and strengthen local capacity.
3. Provide consulting and training to ensure that our systems provide the most benefit they possibly can in the countries that use them.
4. Support research that investigates how systems can best improve health outcomes.
5. Develop and promote ways of working that minimise the negative impacts of health supply chain operations on the natural world; and
6. Provide other support and assistance consistent with this charitable purpose.

How did we get here?

The mSupply Foundation. So new and shiny. So little track record!
Well actually, we’ve got history.
If you don’t care, click “back” now, but what follows will hopefully reassure anyone who cares that we’re here for the long haul, that we’re capable and that we understand what we’re doing.

Back last century there were a couple of volunteers looking for software to manage the Medical Supply Department in Kathmandu, Nepal. Out of that search came mSupply. It’s going strong at https://www.msupply.org.nz

The organisation that was set up at the time to look after mSupply was Sustainable Solutions. It’s incorporated as a company, but we’ve always considered ourselves primarily wanting to serve the developing world in the way we know how – by building great systems to manage health supply chains.

Over the years people liked what we do, and we now work in over 30 countries. Our systems most likely serve about 100 million people and are adding millions of new records per year.

The mSupply Foundation is the next phase of our quest to do as much good as we can. It addresses three specific issues.

• We are in the process of developing a new version of mSupply that is open source and free. The mSupply Foundation is the owner of Open mSupply.
• A company always raises a few eyebrows. What if the shareholders make loads of money? What if they change their objectives and start to charge for what used to be free? It’s better than such a project is curated by a not-for-profit organisation, where it’s baked into our trust deed that all profits go back into our charitable purpose.
• The mSupply Foundation is governed by a board. This means that the sustainability of the organisation isn’t tied up with share ownership. We also want our board to reflect the deep commitment our team has to doing a great job, and at the same time provide a forum for outside expertise to enrich what we do. We’re committing to having gender balance in our external board members, and getting to gender balance on our internal board members by the end of 2020.

Ethos

At the heart of what we believe is that relationships have priority over production, so we try to value our staff, our clients, suppliers, even government officials, as people rather than just for what they can do for us.

We also care a lot about honesty, integrity.

We also want to contribute to our society by making products that make a difference. We get much more excited by products that help organisations provide better health care, or better information for their donors, than we do about products that are just to make more money for a company.

We like software- it’s a combination of art and science, and gives a great outlet to express the gift of creativity we were given.

That said, we’re only interested in solutions that will really benefit our clients. That won’t happen unless the people, the motivation and at least some basic infrastructure are in place. Our ethos means we need to be honest about these things, and not proceed with profitable projects if they aren’t likely to succeed.

We hope that in some small way our modelling the way we believe a business should be run will rub off on the people we come into contact with.