There are 375 medical drug manufacturing companies in Africa for the continent’s population of 1.4 billion. On first glance that seems slim, and on second glance when you compare it to the 10,000+ factories supplying India’s 1.3 billion people, the issue becomes stark.
Not only are the low production volumes problematic, forcing Africans who may be less protected from immunizable diseases to rely on global supply chains for life-saving medicines. With 90% of all medical drugs imported from Europe, North America and Asia, serious bottleneck problems within the supply chain can be drastically alleviated through local drug manufacturing.
Yes, it will take significant investment, infrastructural improvements and strong leadership, but those hurdles will have to be overcome in order to reverse our dependence on imports. A dependence that leads to high and unstable costs and millions of dollars worth of medicine wasted, which should have helped thousands of patients.
If you’ve ever sat watching the highly-stacked container ships glide into port in Lagos, Mombasa or Durban, that’s where most of our medicines arrive. But that’s only the first step in a long and convoluted journey to patients. Many key drugs even expire on arrival – you read that right. Pharmacies and healthcare centres are forced to destroy the expired products the moment they arrive; this can lead to a wavering supply of more perishable medication for patients. Alongside drug wastage, patients and healthcare systems have to absorb price inflation due to various charges at the ports and logistical costs to deliver to pharmacies and medical centres.
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It’s encouraging to hear that Moderna is expanding its manufacturing capacity on the continent. Nonetheless, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Africa’s dependency on healthcare imports and benefactors grew even more apparent. By August 2021, 96 million doses had been administered in the UK (population 67 million) compared to just 73 million on the continent.
While vaccines continue to grab the headlines, equal focus should be given to antibiotics, antimalarials, family planning products and supplements. What local drug manufacturing does for these categories is subtle but crucial – delivering products specifically designed for the African market. Based on data collected from Field Intelligence’s Shelf Life platform, we’ve discovered that African patients prefer smaller packets with fewer pills per prescription due to cost. International and Big Pharma have less incentive to meet this need, whereas locally manufactured products could be tailored to sensitivities in the market with less impact on margins.
Of course, domestic producers do import materials and inputs too. And they are susceptible to inflationary production costs such as electricity tariffs, currency fluctuations and capital constraints within wider macroeconomic contexts. But over time costs will come down, and these initial risks are a worthwhile tradeoff to secure Made in Africa medicines; designed for Africans, reducing wastage and with the obvious boon in good jobs created in an impactful sector.
Support from domestic governments and medical bodies, such as the new African Medicines Agency (AMA), will add political weight to enhance the value of the African medical market. Nonetheless, many of the arguments are neither political nor economic, rather social in delivering quality medicines at affordable prices at the time required to save lives and improve overall healthcare on the continent.
Suleman Sule is the Director of Pharmacy Services at Field Intelligence and has been with the company for just over three years. In addition, Suleman has been the General Manager of Operations for the company’s pay-as-you-sell pharmacy subscription service, Shelf Life, since 2018
