manage orders and deliver drugs more efficiently.  But this suggests the problem was lack of planning, rather than one of incentives.  When the pilot is scaled up, what incentives will the district-level planners have to deliver drugs efficiently?  And why would we favor such a system to logistics run by private sector pharmacies (Coca-Cola appears in every village in Africa with no problems) combined with direct fiscal subsidies to households for particular drugs? Patricio's example of using Coca-Cola's distribution system to deliver anti-AIDS drugs in Tanzania begins to get to the heart of the matter.  The reason Coca-Cola has such an efficient supply chain is that customers pay for their drinks, so the "providers" have an incentive to deliver.  Most drugs too are private goods (in that the only beneficiary is the patient) but, in our effort to make sure poor people get access to them, we provide them for free -- to everybody.  This creates a huge "rent" -- the difference between the value of the drug and its market price -- that is then captured by the non-poor -- including the people who steal the drugs from the clinic and the doctors who are absent.  As a result, the poor -- the very people the policy was intended to benefit -- lose out. The solution therefore is not to pour more money into a leaking bucket -- or provide absentee doctors with better information -- but to empower poor people with the ability to hold health workers and