The African Development Bank and the vaccine alliance GAVI planned to invest $3.2 billion in pharmaceutical production on the continent. The announcement was made last week by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
There have been calls for African countries to develop their own vaccine production infrastructure, rather than relying on imports, which left much of the Global South unable to access COVID-19 vaccines produced in the US and Europe during the pandemic.
Africa CDC also said it had finalized a continental procurement mechanism, which will pool demand from all 55 African Union member states, totaling 1.4 billion people, Nile Post reported.