The state has invited firms to bid for the construction of a Covid-19 vaccine plant through a global tender as it enters the final part of manufacturing the jab locally.
The government is seeking to recruit a consultant and a firm to design, build, commission and maintain a fully-fledged vaccine manufacturing facility.
“To achieve this objective, the Government of Kenya desires to recruit a GMP consultant and a firm to design-build-commission-maintain a fully-fledged vaccine manufacturing facility,” a public notice, signed by the director-general Kenya BioVax Institute states.
The tender has been floated through an advertisement by the Kenya BioVax Institute, a State-owned commercial and manufacturing firm.
This comes barely three months after President Uhuru Kenyatta announced that Kenya had started building a filling plant for the Covid-19 vaccines by April ahead of a fully-fledged manufacturing capability by 2024.
“As the first step towards this goal, we have established the Kenya BioVax Limited as a venture that would locally produce anti-Covid-19 vaccines. I therefore, directed the Ministry of Health to operationalise the company,” President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Kenya has been recording a high covid-19 positivity rate of around 10% since the emergence of the Omicron variant despite a high percentage of the population being Vaccinated.
Kenya’s economy, like others, has been hit by the pandemic, as restrictions to curb its spread reduced revenues and stifled growth. Economic output contracted for the first time in nearly three decades last year, pummelled by the impact of the coronavirus crisis on key sectors such as tourism.
Growth slid to negative 0.3 percent last year from 5.0 percent in 2019. Recovery has started, but there have been fears the pace could be slowed down by a shortage of Covid-19 vaccines and new waves of infections.
The Central Bank of Kenya expects the economy to grow by 5.6 percent this year.
