ABA Editorial · Jul 6, 2025 · 14 min read
African Union member states committed to manufacturing 60 percent of the continent's vaccines domestically by 2040, alongside broader pharmaceutical manufacturing expansion. Afreximbank has pledged a USD 2 billion facility to support healthcare and health product manufacturing. The 2nd Vaccine and Health Products Manufacturing Forum in Cairo in February 2025 convened twelve member states and leading DFIs. This report maps the category.
African countries import the overwhelming majority of the pharmaceutical products their populations consume. Estimates from multiple sources place the share of imported pharmaceuticals across Sub-Saharan Africa at approximately 70 to 80 percent or higher, with particular concentration of imports in active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), finished dosage forms for complex medicines, and almost all vaccines. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the structural vulnerability this import dependence creates. African countries found themselves at the back of the queue for vaccines as high-income countries bought early supply and vaccine nationalism became an operational reality during 2021 and 2022. The response was a renewed political commitment to continental pharmaceutical manufacturing autonomy, formalized through the African Union target of manufacturing 60 percent of the continent's vaccines domestically by 2040. This report maps the pharmaceutical manufacturing landscape, the policy framework, and the operators working toward the 2040 target.
African pharmaceutical manufacturing is concentrated in a small number of countries. South Africa has the most mature pharmaceutical industry on the continent, with Aspen Pharmacare as a globally significant generic drug manufacturer, Adcock Ingram as a diversified pharmaceutical producer, and a supporting ecosystem of smaller operators. Egypt has a substantial domestic pharmaceutical sector serving both its own population and regional export markets. Morocco has pharmaceutical capacity anchored by a handful of large operators and has been positioning itself as a manufacturing hub for North and West Africa. Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and Ethiopia each have smaller pharmaceutical manufacturing bases that produce a portion of domestic generic drug demand but remain heavily dependent on imports for more complex products and for most active ingredients.
The common structural limitation is that African pharmaceutical manufacturing is concentrated in finished dosage forms (converting imported APIs into tablets, capsules, syrups, or injectable products) rather than API synthesis itself. The API step captures the majority of the value and technical sophistication in the pharmaceutical value chain, and its absence from most African countries means that manufacturing autonomy is more limited than the domestic production numbers suggest.
Afreximbank announced a USD 2 billion facility dedicated to healthcare and health product manufacturing across the continent, and has been implementing the facility through project-level investments in pharmaceutical manufacturers, vaccine producers, and supporting infrastructure. The facility represents one of the largest single commitments to African pharmaceutical manufacturing from any institution, and it complements commitments from the African Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation, and bilateral donors including the French Development Agency.
Afreximbank presented its progress on the facility at the 2nd Vaccine and Health Products Manufacturing Forum, held in Cairo from February 4 to 6, 2025. The forum was convened by Africa CDC, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Regionalized Vaccine Manufacturing Collaborative (RVMC), with Egypt's Unified Procurement Authority as host. Twelve African Union member states participated: Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Uganda, and Zambia. The forum's agenda covered investment strategies, regulatory harmonization, and cross-sector collaboration needed to accelerate local pharmaceutical production.
One of the specific structural challenges facing African pharmaceutical manufacturing is regulatory fragmentation. Each African country operates its own National Regulatory Authority (NRA), with varying standards, inspection capacity, and approval timelines. A pharmaceutical manufacturer that wants to sell its product across multiple African countries must navigate multiple regulatory approval processes, each with its own costs and delays. This fragmentation raises the cost base for regional manufacturers and reduces the effective market size they can address.
The African Medicines Agency (AMA), established by treaty in 2019 and formally launched in 2022, is intended to address this fragmentation by providing a continental regulatory framework that can recognize and coordinate with national authorities. The AMA's operational launch and progressive scaling is one of the most important institutional developments in the African pharmaceutical ecosystem, though the practical impact will take years to fully materialize as the agency builds capacity and as member states integrate their processes with its framework.
Aspen Pharmacare, based in South Africa, is the most successful African pharmaceutical manufacturer by revenue and international reach. The company has built a globally competitive position in specific generic drug categories, with manufacturing facilities in South Africa and internationally. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Aspen played a role in the global vaccine response through fill-and-finish operations for Johnson and Johnson COVID vaccines, though the experience also illustrated the limitations of African manufacturing autonomy when the company found itself unable to export significant volumes of the vaccines it had produced.
The Aspen experience offers lessons for the broader continental pharmaceutical ambition. Building globally competitive manufacturing capability requires decades of investment, skilled workforce development, and regulatory relationships that cannot be replicated quickly. Aspen is the product of decades of accumulated capability. Replicating its position in other African countries will require sustained commitment over comparable timescales.
The International Finance Corporation and other development finance institutions have emphasized that achieving African pharmaceutical manufacturing targets will require substantial private investment alongside the public and concessional financing currently being mobilized. Private pharmaceutical investment in African manufacturing has historically been limited, partly because the commercial returns available in African markets have been lower than alternative investment opportunities, and partly because the operational complexity of pharmaceutical manufacturing in African conditions (regulatory uncertainty, supply chain challenges, workforce gaps) has deterred investors willing to deploy in the sector elsewhere.
Changing this calculation requires a combination of market-expanding policies (pooled procurement across African countries, preferential purchasing for domestically manufactured products, AMA operational progress) and risk-reducing instruments (guarantees, blended finance, long-term offtake agreements) that can bring private investors into the sector at commercial terms.
Three indicators will shape African pharmaceutical manufacturing. First, whether the Afreximbank USD 2 billion facility produces visible project-level investments that translate into new manufacturing capacity or expansion of existing facilities. Second, whether the African Medicines Agency progresses from institutional launch to operational effectiveness, reducing the regulatory friction that has historically limited regional market expansion. Third, whether pooled procurement mechanisms develop that give African manufacturers predictable demand from government health systems across multiple countries. Pharmaceutical manufacturing is the longest-horizon project in African health, and the path to the 2040 vaccine target depends on decisions and commitments made over the next several years.