Across Africa, cancer medications have been found to be substandard or counterfeit. That means people are being given medicine that may not work, or that could even cause them harm.
Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.dw.com/en/nearly-20-of-cancer-drugs-defective-in-4-african-nations/a-73062221
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
She is/was a Central African Republic correspondant. A lot of her photos are going to have Africans in them.
I dug a bit: CAFRICA-HEALTH-POVERTY Stephen Hyppolite Liosso Pivara Bembe, a former medical student who was never able to finish his studies, sifts though medicines in the small street pharmacy he owns in Bangui, on 21 February 2022. Informal pharmacies are vital for the poorest population of this Central African country, the second least developed in the world according to the UN and in civil war for 10 years. But there is a flip side to the coin: proliferation of poor quality or fake drugs, resistance to antibiotics, illegal practice of medicine. (Photo by Barbara DEBOUT / AFP) (Photo by BARBARA DEBOUT/AFP via Getty Images)
She has quite a few of Stephen doing tasks in his Pharmacy.
I commend your web search skills!
With that info we can post a better photo taken within moments of the above:
Which shows medications being stored in a normal way in boxes which are neatly stacked and organized on shelves.
The med salad colander thing still completely inexplicable. It doesn’t play any role in the workflow according to the photos I saw. It is a chaotic and dangerous way of storing medication. I hypothesize it is staged for the benefit of the photographer, likely with some art direction from her.
I think it was supposed to portray second hand/dubious origin medications being sorted through rather than a pick n mix.
Undoubtedly there was art direction but I expect that from pretty much every photo ever taken.
Either way I think it would be on the articles author for the picture choice rather than the photographer. I don’t think Getty lets you deny who gets to use your photos.
When Oxford was about to liberate its covid vaccine recipe to enable local production in the global south, bill gates swooped in to talk them down. One of his arguments that ultimately won the day is that global south people are too stupid and irresponsible to be in charge of important medicine like that.
This photo is staged to reinforced that kind of stereotype.