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Africa’s bid to build its own vaccine industry is about to face its biggest test just as Western health funding retreats. The global vaccine alliance Gavi said it will make its first cash disbursements to an African manufacturer this year, marking an important milestone as the continent seeks to produce 60% of its vaccines locally by 2040.
The initial payments, expected in the second half of 2026, are part of Gavi’s $1.2 billion African Vaccine Manufacturing Accelerator, a 10-year initiative to spur production on the continent through demand-linked incentives. And the disbursements offer an important landmark, moving the project from the construction phase into commercialization, as nations on the continent seek greater healthcare autonomy by reducing dependence on imported supplies and donor-led emergency responses when health crises such as the current Ebola outbreak strike.
“The manufacturing of drug substances on the continent is a high priority,” Shanelle Hall, the principal adviser to the director general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told Semafor. The agency is pushing African companies to move beyond so-called fill-and-finish operations. Instead, it is seeking technology transfer agreements that enable local production of drugs and position African firms as producers of new products, improving both commercial prospects and health security.
Scientists, health officials, and industry leaders argue that a long road remains to building an African life sciences industry. Success will depend less on constructing facilities than on securing long-term buyers, trusted regulators, technology transfer, and patient capital that can sustain long-term production.
In a bid to help jump start this, Gavi said last month it was seeking an additional $189 million to “support the rapid development of Africa’s vaccine manufacturing ecosystem.”
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The African Union and Africa CDC have set a target of producing 60% of required vaccines on the continent by 2040, an ambition shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, when African countries struggled to access vaccines while richer countries locked up early supplies.
Recent Western aid cuts have sharpened that ambition. As donor budgets tighten, African health sector leaders have increasingly framed local manufacturing not only as an industrial policy goal, but as a route to greater self-reliance in health security, alongside pooled procurement and more domestic financing.
And Gavi is not the only player in the field: Earlier this year, South Africa’s Biovac secured backing from the International Finance Corporation, the European Investment Bank, and the European Commission to support end-to-end vaccine manufacturing.
But boosting manufacturing is not just a matter of building factories. Producers need predictable demand, technology transfer agreements, trained workers, regulatory approvals, and the right mix of grants, concessional loans, commercial debt and guarantees. Experts describe manufacturing as an interlocked chain in which weaknesses in procurement, regulation, financing, or market demand can undermine the entire effort.
Nigeria, for one, is looking to tackle those challenges through a wider push to build an end-to-end healthcare manufacturing sector, rather than treating vaccine production as a standalone factory project. “If the ecosystem, the enabling environment, is not really the right one to attract local manufacturing, you’re not going to make any progress,” said Dr. Abdu Mukhtar, who leads the Presidential Initiative for Unlocking the Healthcare Value Chain. In a bid to nourish that ecosystem, Nigeria is developing three vaccine manufacturing projects alongside efforts to expand workforce training, clinical trials, active pharmaceutical ingredient production, and pooled procurement systems, Mukhtar said.
Dr. Delese Mimi Darko, director general of the African Medicines Agency, cited an additional challenge: “If your regulator is not strong, your product is a waste,” she told Semafor, underscoring the importance of a clear, rules-based system. She also said African countries must be strategic about where they compete, noting that some may be better positioned to manufacture antivirals, antibodies, analgesics, or other medicines rather than vaccines. That broader manufacturing base has already started to take form: Egypt’s Eva Pharma has a licensing deal to manufacture Eli Lilly’s Olumiant arthritis treatment for African markets, South Africa is seeking local production of Gilead’s long-acting HIV prevention drug Lenacapavir, and Africa CDC and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative have identified African manufacturers investing in biologics production.
Paul’s view
Africa’s vaccine manufacturing ambitions are entering a different phase. The question is no longer whether the continent can build factories, but whether it can build markets for what those factories produce.
Political support and development finance can help construct facilities. Keeping them alive requires predictable orders, trusted regulators, skilled workers, long-term customer capital, and procurement systems willing to commit before the next crisis. The industry’s biggest challenge is bridging the gap between public health ambitions and commercial reality.
New technologies may improve the science, but they do not solve the underlying business problem. Timothy Endy, program leader at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, told me that AI could help accelerate vaccine design and identify manufacturing risks earlier, but said the challenge is not specific to Africa. “The science is not necessarily the bottleneck,” he said, pointing instead to contracts, non-disclosure agreements, intellectual property, licensing, and technology transfer arrangements that can slow production.
In other words, ‘the science’ is getting faster. The commercial architecture is not.
Room for Disagreement
Some critics argue that AVMA is still built around the wrong kind of market logic. Els Torreele and Heather Sherwin wrote in PLOS Global Public Health that pull incentives based on WHO prequalification and UNICEF tenders risk favoring larger international producers with the capital to reach those milestones. Emerging African manufacturers, meanwhile, still need earlier support for research and development, clinical trials, and regulatory dossiers. Health advocacy group Wemos has made a similar argument, saying AVMA intervenes too late in the value chain and should do more to support fully fledged technology transfer and locally governed production.
Nigerian professor and virologist Oyewale Tomori argues that governance matters just as much. He pointed to a previous $7 million allocation for local vaccine production in Nigeria and said his concern was that the priority became disbursing the money through contractors rather than building sustainable production capacity “The ministry wanted, by all means, to get that money out,” he said. Without stronger accountability, he argues, simply injecting more capital into the system risks repeating old mistakes.
Notable
- Africa’s vaccine ambitions will succeed only if governments build the markets, research capacity, and regulatory systems that make manufacturing commercially viable.