Partisia Partners with OriginAll to Tackle Counterfeit Medicine Fraud in Africa

[PR – Zug, Switzerland, 21st December 2021]

Partisia Blockchain is joining forces with OriginAll, a Swiss-born technology company, to tackle the massive humanitarian issue of counterfeit medicine and lack of accountability for remittances and charitable donations.

The problem of counterfeit medicine pervades across African countries where up to 70% of medicines are fake according to WHO estimations. These illicit products kill millions of people every year while providing funding to criminal organizations and fostering corruption. Counterfeiting is estimated to cost over $4 trillion per year for the worldwide economy.

Solving the problem is no easy task. Governments, international institutions and civil society organizations are often unable to reach the end user, and often must rely on many layers of middlemen. This exposes economies and citizens to many risks and further disincentivizes international NGOs from deploying more funds to improve healthcare across Africa.

Here, OriginAll together with Partisia Blockchain can see an opportunity to make a difference. The result of the partnership is a unique system called OriginAll Healthies, which uses tokenization to reinvent how remittances and charitable donations are distributed. Thanks to Healthies — special tokens that can be used only to purchase real medicine — the donors can ensure that all their money will be used by their intended recipients.

All Healthies transactions, conducted through Partisia Blockchain, ensure that the holder is purchasing the intended product (medicine or healthcare service) from an authorized seller and within a predefined time frame. Each transaction is tied to the Unique Identifier (UID) of the legitimate product. Transactions that don’t meet these criteria will fail. At the same time, Partisia Blockchain’s privacy solution allows private data to remain confidential.

The use of Partisia Blockchain’s technology ensures that this system can be used by anyone, including the unbanked, in alignment with the UHC 2030 by reinforcing and advancing quality health services available for all and ensuring people are not pushed into poverty by health care costs. Healthies are intended both for large-scale organizations and for the average person sending remittances to their loved ones, and provide complete reassurance for both Healthies senders and receivers. This technology will further support the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) Secretariat, with whom OriginAll has signed an exclusive agreement in its mandate to create a safe trade zone across African countries. With OriginAll’s partnership with 54 African nations, Healthies can be potentially rolled out to over 1.3 billion people.

“OriginAll is an ideal example of what we want to achieve as a project and with our focus on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG),” said Kurt Nielsen, Partisia Blockchain President. “Partisia Blockchain enables the combined use of public transparent blockchain and privacy-preserving use of confidential data required for the next generation decentralized healthcare solutions. With OriginAll we use this technology to protect the individual patient as well as to enable competing companies to collaborate with sensitive corporate data — both are needed to fight counterfeit medicine. Altogether, OriginAll allows us to prove the power of Web 3.0 put to work to save lives.”

“We are extremely proud to have the opportunity to join forces with Partisia Blockchain combining our expertise in anti-counterfeiting and illicit trade with Partisia Blockchain’s unique Web 3.0 blockchain, built on decades of research and commercial grade multiparty computation software development,” said Hans Schwab, CEO of OriginAll. “Together we will make sure that those most in need have better and more equitable access to safe, verifiable medicines and healthcare products while providing donors an unparalleled level of transparency and auditability.”

About Partisia

Partisia Blockchain is a Web 3.0 public blockchain built for trust, transparency, privacy, and speed of light finalization. The cutting-edge solution to decentralization’s confidentiality and privacy challenges, Partisia Blockchain represents the first successful complete integration of blockchain technology with another commercial grade type of distributed cryptography known as Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC). This combination of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) with privacy-enhancing software allows enterprises to experience the advantages of decentralized technologies while still guaranteeing that data remains private and secure.

About OriginAll

OriginAll, S.A., a corporation duly registered in Switzerland, has been co-founded by experts in the field of product security and traceability. OriginAll develops aggregation platforms that allows users to verify the authenticity of a product, regardless of the solution adopted by a brand. OriginAll neither competes with, nor favors any particular traceability solution, nor does it intend to disrupt already deployed or imposed solutions and programs. Rather, it creates their interoperability to offer governments and consumers a single, transparent, self-financed source of product verification, product information and data correlation.