Axmed

The inaugural Axmed Access Summit needed to establish itself as East Africa's authoritative platform for healthcare access policy — bringing together 800+ senior stakeholders from 12 countries around one of the most complex challenges in African healthcare: equitable access to essential medicines and treatments.

For a first edition, the stakes were high. The summit needed to produce genuine policy momentum, not just a successful event.

Newmark designed the communications and influence programme to work across the full arc of the summit: pre-event stakeholder engagement to build anticipation and commitment; in-event communications to amplify key moments and ensure media coverage reached beyond the room; post-event activation to ensure that the commitments made inside the summit translated into documented policy positions and ongoing stakeholder relationships.

The influence programme covered stakeholder communications, media strategy, messaging architecture, and post-event documentation.

A multilateral stakeholder base — including government representatives, international health organisations, pharmaceutical companies, and patient advocacy groups from 12 countries — required a communications approach that was calibrated to each audience's specific concerns and interests while maintaining the coherence of the summit's central narrative.