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The Nigeria-based Novartis Africa cluster legal team, led by Vivian Osayande, received nominations from dozens of external clients across the continent. The wide geography in which Novartis operates – covering 46 jurisdictions across Africa – means the legal team has to continually innovate and find new ways to facilitate business. As a result, the range of matters for which Osayande and her team were nominated was broad.

One nominator pointed to the team’s ‘tireless’ work in Sudan to help provide access to healthcare in the face of US-imposed trade sanctions. Novartis’ Africa legal team was involved in obtaining Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) licenses, working around the currency restrictions and setting up new distribution and promotion agreements to allow vital medical services to continue. The team’s work opening a representative office in Ethiopia was also praised for its ‘creative approach to dealing with the regulatory challenges’. In Ghana, the team was credited with helping to facilitate a ‘rapid growth in evidence-based management of sickle cell anaemia’ by contributing to ongoing negotiations between Novartis, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the United States and the Sickle Cell Foundation in Ghana.

Perhaps the most impressive achievement was in Nigeria, where the team helped structure a strategic services and licensing deal with mPharma Data Inc. The company, which recently received funding from Alchemist, a Silicon Valley enterprise accelerator backed by Cisco, is seeking to transform the healthcare market by building the largest pharmaceutical data platform for emerging markets and has developed the “pharmacovigilance” market research and analysis app. This agreement – a first-of-its kind deal in the Nigerian pharmaceutical industry that will allow doctors and healthcare professionals to access a continuously updated electronic prescription platform – required the legal team to ‘work through the boundaries of compliance in a highly regulated industry to come up with the right structure and documentation [covering all areas from] privacy, antitrust, intellectual property, fair market value, to competitive commercial terms’.

The Nigerian legal team also collaborated with Novartis Access in negotiations with the Nigerian the Ministry of Health over a novel $1 per treatment per month deal, a new approach designed for lower-income countries. Under this legally complex model, public-private partnership (PPP) agreements will be executed to improve the ability of local health systems to diagnose and treat non-communicable diseases. A pilot for the scheme has already been launched in Kenya and the legal team has worked hard to ensure the wider rollout is commercially sustainable.