African Continental Free Trade Area Secretary-General Wamkele Keabetswe Mene has called for accelerated continental integration to support Africa’s pharmaceutical manufacturing ambitions.
- •Mene argues that fragmented trade systems are undermining the scale needed for Africa to produce and distribute medicines competitively.
- •Speaking in support of collaboration with the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the African Medicines Agency, Mene said Africa’s current challenge lies not only in manufacturing capacity but also in the inability to move pharmaceutical products efficiently across borders.
- •He insisted that the continent’s current annual pharmaceutical import burden, which he cited at approximately $20.5 billion, remains “completely unacceptable.”
“The scale of the challenge that we have is enormous,” Mene said, noting that the AfCFTA framework exists to ensure Africa can manufacture, trade and distribute health products seamlessly across the continent.
He warned that without integrated trade routes and harmonised regulations, African manufacturers would remain trapped serving small domestic markets rather than achieving continental scale.
“If we can reduce Africa’s import bill for diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines to zero, that would be a significant success,” he said, while acknowledging that global supply chains mean Africa is unlikely to manufacture every category of pharmaceutical product internally.
Mene outlined three pillars the AfCFTA is prioritising to support the continent’s pharmaceutical ambitions.
The first is the harmonisation of rules of origin and local content requirements across African markets, a move he said is intended to deepen industrial development and encourage regional value chains.
Second is intellectual property protection. Mene said the AfCFTA protocol on intellectual property rights includes safeguards allowing African countries to intervene during public health emergencies, including suspending certain protections where necessary to ensure access to medicines and healthcare products.
The third pillar is improving transit systems and trade corridors to guarantee the rapid movement of goods across African borders.
Lessons from the Pandemic
Reflecting on the Covid-19 pandemic, Mene recalled how pharmaceutical products were blocked from crossing borders in early 2020 as countries imposed emergency restrictions.
“We had to make rapid interventions and deploy trade routes because pharmaceutical products could not transit through borders during the pandemic,” he said.
He said efficient continental logistics are now central to Africa’s health security strategy, enabling local manufacturers to supply not just national markets but the entire African market.
According to Mene, the broader objective is to create sufficient market scale to attract investors into pharmaceutical and vaccine manufacturing while strengthening Africa’s public health resilience.
“If investors can produce for the entire continent, they can see sustainable returns for the industry,” he said.
Mene also criticised Africa’s heavy dependence on imported medical products, describing the continent’s pharmaceutical import bill as unsustainable.
He argued that AfCFTA’s key investment proposition lies in providing manufacturers access to a single continental market of 1.4 billion people under harmonised trade rules, giving pharmaceutical investors the scale needed to justify long-term industrial investment.
