Supply Chain Maturity Model

Effective national supply chains are critical to provide sustainable access to safe, quality and affordable supplies and services for pregnant women, mothers, newborns, children and adolescents. While significant resources to strengthen national supply chains are often allocated, the performance of these supply chains frequently does not meet the expectations of their stakeholders or end-users. 

UNICEF Supply Chain Maturity Model is a participatory, qualitative and government-led supply chain assessment that allows to determine whether supply chain management is a barrier to access. It reviews the performance of 13 critical operational and technical supply chain functions - linked to the UNICEF supply chain rainbow below - across five levels, where level 1 brings evidence of minimum development while level 5 reflects best supply chain management and practices.

The evidence generated is critical to inform planning, coordination, and targeted investment allocation among partners. 

Deploying the Maturity Model serves three main objectives:

• Assessing and quantifying the strengths, gaps and priorities for improvement across all areas of the public supply chains; the results of the assessment are used to establish performance baselines which serve as the foundation for informing continuum improvement planning process and developing supply chain strengthening plans that will ensure children’s higher level of equitable access to products and services. 
• Informing and coordinating partners’ technical cooperation in support of governments’ identified objectives and targets. UNICEF offers expert technical expertise in many areas, including in strengthening countries’ domestic resource mobilization capacity for supplies; deploying cutting edge innovation to reach the last mile; improving product visibility from manufacturer to child; digitalizing supply chains; and supporting the professionalization of the supply chain workforce (see UNICEF's supply chain strengthening value proposition).  
• Appraising the efficiency and impact of the interventions deployed by partners. The Maturity Model is used as a Monitoring and Evaluation framework that enables governments and partners to measure the impact of their technical assistance along the maturity continuum.

Since 2019, UNICEF Supply Chain Maturity Model has been utilized by 30 governments to identify their investment needs, deploy corrective interventions and ensure higher level of access to products and services across various public programmes (health, nutrition, education and WASH).

The findings of the assessments have been critical to identify partnership opportunities and synergies across partners and donors to inform investments and streamline resources. To this end, UNICEF has developed a System Strengthening Cross-Partner Coordination Platform where partners can register their engagements and visualize the supply chain strengthening activities registered by all development partners in countries.

A supporting distance-learning course, including a multilingual application is available online.