This article is a summary of UNIDO’s October 2025 report, “Unlocking Vaccines and Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Potentials in Africa: Guidelines for Effective Investment Promotion, Innovative Finance, and Regulatory Frameworks.”
The core argument
Africa produces less than 1% of its vaccines and a limited share of its essential medicines, despite carrying a disproportionate share of the global disease burden.
Africa produces less than 1% of its vaccines and imports over 70% of all pharmaceuticals consumed on the continent.
Ten countries (Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, and Tunisia) account for 75% of the continental pharmaceutical market by value.
Import dependency is not limited to smaller economies.
It is a continent-wide condition.
COVID-19 made this dependency impossible to ignore.
The report’s central argument is that manufacturing capacity alone will not fix the problem.
Regulatory harmonization, financing mechanisms, workforce development, and market demand creation must all advance together, or none of them will succeed.
Between 2020 and 2024, G7 members committed nearly 3 billion USD across 39 initiatives to support the agenda, with Germany (26%), France (23%), and the United States (15%) as the leading bilateral contributors.
Most of that money went to continental-level regulatory strengthening and established manufacturers.
West and Central African producers have seen comparatively little.
Regulatory maturity and the ML3 threshold
The report organizes countries around the WHO Maturity Level 3 (ML3) designation, which signals a stable, well-functioning national regulatory system.
As of December 2024, eight African countries have achieved ML3: Tanzania (May 2018), Ghana (April 2020), Egypt (March 2022), Nigeria (March 2022), South Africa (October 2022), Zimbabwe (June 2024), Rwanda (December 2024), and Senegal (December 2024).
In February 2025, ML3 regulators signed a Memorandum of Understanding to streamline approvals through mutual reliance.
Progress, but the gap remains wide: almost 30% of African national regulatory authorities still lack the expertise, quality management systems, or resources to perform basic regulatory functions.
The ECOWAS agenda and the Senegal anchor
The report gives particular attention to ECOWAS, identifying six priority areas: regulatory harmonization across member states, regional vaccine and API manufacturing (with Senegal’s Institut Pasteur de Dakar as the leading model), pharmaceutical Special Economic Zones, a West Africa Pharmaceutical Investment Fund, development of the Abidjan-Lagos Trade Corridor for distribution, and strengthened efforts against counterfeit medicines.
Senegal is the clearest country case.
The MADIBA project (Manufacturing in Africa for Disease Immunization and Building Autonomy), a joint effort by IPD and the Mastercard Foundation backed by 75 million USD from the European Investment Bank, is expected to produce up to 300 million vaccine doses at full capacity.
Senegal is one of six African countries receiving mRNA technology transfer through the WHO Hub program, and its national plan targets manufacturing 50% of the country’s pharmaceutical products domestically by 2035.
Senegal also hosts the CARE Centre (Centre Africain de Resilience aux Epidemies), established in 2021 with EU funding, which has become a benchmark in biosecurity and disease control training.
The Africa CDC designated Senegal as the inaugural site for its Regional Capability and Capacity Centre Network in 2023.
No other ECOWAS country has this concentration of institutional infrastructure for the pharmaceutical manufacturing agenda.
Workforce development: The named bottleneck
The report’s most actionable finding is that workforce development is the critical bottleneck for pharmaceutical manufacturing sustainability in West Africa.
Step 6 of the report’s seven-step investment framework states it plainly: “Building a skilled workforce and enhancing industrial capabilities are necessary for long-term success.
Training programs in GMP, digital production systems, biopharmaceuticals, and investment appraisal must be scaled across academic institutions and centers of excellence.”
For ECOWAS, the report recommends a Regional Center of Excellence for Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, modelled after the CARE Centre, along with twinning programs between West African regulators and international bodies like the EMA and FDA, and university partnerships to develop medicines tailored to regional health challenges.
UNIDO has already delivered training in Senegal covering GMP, lean manufacturing, biomanufacturing, and investment project appraisal, including a virtual reality program developed with Sartorius for bioprocessing training.
These efforts are concentrated in Senegal.
The report does not present a credible plan for replicating them across the 15 ECOWAS member states.
Demand creation and market absorption: The unresolved challenge
The report is most honest here about what it does not yet know how to solve.
The supply side of the agenda has received the bulk of attention and money.
Without stable, predictable demand for locally manufactured products, no manufacturing investment can be sustained.
The report notes that G7 donors have focused on “market shaping and demand creation,” citing GAVI’s African Vaccine Manufacturing Accelerator (AVMA) as a key instrument, and recommends regional pooled procurement for both ECOWAS and the East African Community to ensure demand predictability.
What the report does not analyze is whether health system actors at the point of service delivery, prescribers, pharmacists, and subnational supply chain managers, are ready to absorb locally manufactured products.
This is the layer where manufacturing investment must ultimately translate into prescribing behavior, distribution decisions, and patient access.
The report identifies this service-delivery workforce dimension as requiring further work, but does not resolve it.
The gap is consequential.
A factory that produces medicines nobody prescribes, a supply chain that cannot reach the district level, a pharmacist who defaults to imported generics because local products are unfamiliar: these are the conditions under which manufacturing investment fails to generate sustainable jobs or improve health outcomes.
The demand-side workforce question is not secondary to the supply-side investment agenda.
It is the precondition for that investment to pay off.
Reference
UNIDO (2025). Unlocking Vaccines and Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Potentials in Africa: Guidelines for Effective Investment Promotion, Innovative Finance, and Regulatory Frameworks. Vienna.