Towards a safe and sufficient blood supply in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Most countries in Sub‐Saharan Africa ( SSA ) are either low‐income or low‐middle income countries, that is countries whose gross national income per capita is $995 ( USD ) or less or $996–3895, respectively. Added to this, they have very few health care professionals specifically trained in transfusion medicine and are the countries whose populations have a high prevalence of transfusion‐transmissible agents (especially HIV , hepatitis B and malaria) and whose patients (women haemorrhaging at birth, men in motor vehicle or motorcycle accidents, children with malaria or sickle cell anaemia) are often in urgent need of blood transfusion. This combination of few resources, both financial and human, combined with many potential donors at risk of transmitting infection and patients with urgent transfusion requirements renders the provision of a safe and adequate blood supply in SSA extremely challenging. In this review, we will discuss the current literature addressing how these challenges are being met and present one example of a SSA national blood transfusion service, the Uganda Blood Transfusion Service.