NewzPresident John Dramani Mahama has called for the removal of regulatory and financial barriers that continue to hinder the development of integrated health and pharmaceutical value chains across Africa. According to President Mahama, Africa’s health transformation cannot be achieved through isolated national interventions but requires countries to coordinate their markets, regulations, investment frameworks and industrial capacities. He said the continent must create an environment in which health products can move efficiently across borders and manufacturers can access markets beyond their home countries.
“To turn these isolated successes into a continental ecosystem, we must eliminate regulatory and financial friction,” President Mahama said. He argued that the African Continental Free Trade Area provided an important framework for creating a larger market for African pharmaceutical manufacturers and encouraging investment in production capacity. The President said Ghana was deploying dedicated task forces and a Reform Interlock Observatory through the Accra Reset Presidential Council to monitor capital flows, enforce policy commitments and identify non-tariff barriers affecting regional value chains.
He said such mechanisms were necessary to ensure that political commitments translated into practical opportunities for businesses and investors. President Mahama also challenged African regulators to accelerate the operationalisation of the African Medicines Agency. “How quickly can we operationalise the African Medicines Agency to ensure a single drug approval opens the doors to all 54 AU member states?” he asked.
He said regulatory harmonisation would be critical to creating a truly integrated continental pharmaceutical market and attracting the scale of investment required to build competitive African industries. President John Dramani Mahama has urged African countries to accelerate investment in local pharmaceutical manufacturing to reduce the continent’s dependence on imported medicines and vaccines and strengthen its health security. Speaking at the Health Plenary of the Alamein Africa Forum in Alamein, Egypt, President Mahama said Africa currently imports more than 70 per cent of its pharmaceuticals and nearly 99 per cent of its vaccines.
He said the dependence was resulting in significant foreign exchange outflows while leaving African countries exposed to disruptions in global supply chains. “Each year, tens of billions of dollars leave our economies to purchase medicines from abroad,” President Mahama said. He argued that the situation presented not only a challenge but also “a significant market opportunity for domestic capital” as African countries seek to build resilient pharmaceutical industries.
The President identified a growing African market, import substitution, foreign exchange protection and the African Continental Free Trade Area as key pillars of the business case for domestic pharmaceutical production. He said Africa’s projected population of 2.5 billion by 2050 would create expanding demand for essential medicines, chronic disease management and biologics. Under the AfCFTA, he said, manufacturers could potentially serve a continental market rather than being restricted to individual national markets.
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