London
CNN
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When Africa needs medicines, often the continent must look abroad.
African countries consume about 25% of the vaccines produced globally, but import about 99% of their supply, According to the African Union Development Agency. According to the World Economic Forum, only 36% of demand for packaged medicines is produced locally, and only 3% is supplied by regional trade.
Of the approximately 600 manufacturers of packaged medicines operating on the continent, South Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare is the largest, with more than 9,000 employees in more than 50 countries. CEO Stephen Saad discusses the future of the pharmaceutical sector in Africa, and what lessons Aspen Pharmacare has learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, with CNN’s Eleni Giokos.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
During the pandemic, we have highlighted the disparities that exist on the continent in the pharmaceutical sector. Aspen has had a very strong business presence across Africa and now you are moving up the value chain. Certainly Covid has catalysed a lot of the work you are doing. tell me what you are doing
Saad: You mentioned inequalities. [Covid] Really caught the world’s attention for saying, ‘Hey, that doesn’t feel right.’ We were very proud that we were able to deliver vaccines to the continent in the quantities that we did, but the reality of Covid was that Africa was not vaccinated. But what we have learned – whether it is AIDS or multi-drug-resistant TB – is that we have to be strong regionally. We’ve really doubled down and instead of saying, ‘look we’ve lost the amount of covid vaccine and so we’re discontinuing it,’ we’ve actually put [in] even more capacity. We are committed to one person one vaccine in Africa and we are working very hard on that process.
If I had to ask you to describe what the pharmaceutical sector in Africa looks like right now, what would your answer be?
The answer is simple. When Covid came and Africa needed vaccines, over 90% of the vaccines were supplied by India – and that was not very good. At the end of the day, you can’t ask other countries’ politicians to supply someone else before them. I don’t think anyone wants Africans to suffer, but the reality is that when borders are closed, be it Europe or India, they look after their own populations first. If it weren’t for the aspen, there would never have been a vaccine for the continent in Africa.
There’s a lot of money going into it now, a lot of investment, a lot of initiatives – many of them run by the government. We’ve decided, right off our bat, that we want to be a biological source of not just vaccines but — we’d really like to help oncology, diabetes. We have a lot that we want to do across the continent to make sure that we get access, because there are a lot of diseases that are just underdiagnosed.
The WTO has done a lot on the policy front for Africa. The Continental Free Trade Area is expected to make it much easier for cross-border trade in the pharmaceutical space. What challenges do you face?
There are many challenges. We have facilities in Accra [Ghana]dar es salaam [Tanzania]nairobi [Kenya] … Getting registration approved is not always easy. You decide not to drug in Kenya, for example, because of the cost and time it takes to register. Whereas if it was already registered, we would be exporting manufacture to one of those sectors.
It’s not so much a tariff issue or a trade issue, it’s really a regulatory issue, where your drug needs to be registered in a specific country in a specific way. For example, you can register a product across Europe [via] A central regulatory body. I think Africa should also consider this.
Even if you say you are doing well, you still have to make money. How do you balance all these factors?
it is [misconception] Making a cost-effective supply to you means it’s not very profitable. There is much talk about economies of scale. i remember when we did arv [antiretrovirals, used to treat HIV] And we were desperate to reduce the price by almost 90%. We got some great prices from everyone, but we still made a loss. What we had decided, let’s go for it. At the very least we would have a very expensive social investment project, but we supported ourselves that with the increased volume we would be able to reduce the pricing. That’s what happened – volumes came, prices, technologies, and it became cheaper. So sometimes you just have to go in and do it. I can’t tell you it was an exact science, but I do believe there has to be a balance.
I think the world recognizes that there are people who can pay and there are people who can’t pay. Turning down people who can’t pay simply because they don’t have the money is not a model that is sustainable.