The Secretary-General of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), Wamkele Mene, has called for the urgent acceleration of continental integration to bolster Africa’s pharmaceutical manufacturing ambitions and reduce the continent’s heavy reliance on imported medical products.
According to the Secretary-General, the current annual expenditure of $20.5 billion on pharmaceutical imports—including medicines, diagnostics, and vaccines—is “completely unacceptable” and poses a significant burden on the continent’s economy. He emphasized that streamlining trade systems and harmonizing legal frameworks are essential steps to curbing this dependency.
Mene highlighted that the fragmentation of trade systems across Africa remains a major obstacle, preventing local manufacturers from achieving the scale and competitiveness needed to thrive. He noted that the challenge lies not only in a lack of manufacturing capacity but also in the logistical inability to move health products efficiently across national borders.
He warned that without integrated trade routes and unified regulatory standards, African manufacturers will remain restricted to small domestic markets. The ultimate goal of the AfCFTA is to reduce the import bill for health products to zero, acknowledging that while global supply chains mean every single product may not be produced internally, the vast majority should be made within the continent.
To support these pharmaceutical ambitions, the AfCFTA is prioritizing three strategic pillars. The first focuses on harmonizing “Rules of Origin” to ensure that products manufactured within the continent are recognized as African goods, thereby strengthening regional value chains.
The second pillar involves intellectual property protection. The AfCFTA protocol includes specific safeguards that allow African nations to intervene during public health emergencies, such as pandemics, by suspending certain protections to ensure citizens have immediate access to life-saving medicines and healthcare tools.
The third pillar is the improvement of transit systems and trade corridors. This ensures that pharmaceutical goods can move rapidly across borders without the delays that often plague continental trade. Mene recalled the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, where emergency border restrictions blocked the transit of vital medical supplies, proving that efficient logistics are central to Africa’s health security.
Ultimately, the AfCFTA seeks to create a unified market of 1.4 billion people. By providing manufacturers access to a single continental market under harmonized rules, investors will have the necessary scale to justify long-term industrial investments, fostering a resilient public health system and driving economic growth across Africa.
