Traditional Medicine Forum Steered 2nd Meeting

The second round meeting of the Ethiopian Traditional Medicine National Advisory Forum’s (ETM-NAF) which was organized by the Ethiopian Public Health Institute’s (EPHI) Traditional and Modern Medicine Research Directorate (TMMRD) was held on August 15, 2017.

ETM-NAF’s goal is creating a favorable condition for the establishment of National Council of Ethiopian Traditional Medicine which facilitates the integration of traditional medicine to the primary health care system of the country.

Dr. Tsigereda Kifle, EPHI’s Deputy Director General on her opening speech indicated that the Forum’s first round meeting was held a year ago which resulted to drafting Terms of Reference (ToR) for the Forum.

“The challenging part is to link the traditional medicine products and the manufacturing industries, thus this meeting should focus on how to work on linking these two. And also this Forum is very important to scale up the trends of traditional medicine in the country,” said Dr. Tsigereda.

On his part, Ashenif Tadele Director of TMMRD introduced the agenda of the meeting to be on the ToR, Plan of Action and discussion on the way forward.

“The plan of action has short term, medium term and long term phases which will take one and half, two to four, five years respectively. Currently the policy allows researches to be conducted but there are gaps between the conducted researches and what will be done afterwards so one of the things expected from this forum is to narrow down these gaps,” explained Ashenif.

Jimma University, Addis Ababa University, Gondar University, Traditional Healers, Wondo Genet Agricultural Research Center, Food, Medicine and Health Care Administration and Control Authority, Armauer Hansen Research Institute, Food, Beverage Pharmaceuticals Industry Development and Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute are some of the meeting participants who are also members of the Forum.