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The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and Aspen Pharmacare are in advanced discussions about a long-term demand and supply alignment framework, aimed at giving vaccine manufacturers the market certainty they need to sustain and expand production on the continent.
The talks, announced on Tuesday on the sidelines of the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, centre on creating a multi-year procurement framework that would commit African countries to buying vaccines produced locally, providing manufacturers with the forward visibility needed to justify investment in large-scale output.
No binding agreement has been signed.
The initiative cuts to the heart of a persistent tension in African health policy because, while the continent consumes more than one-billion vaccine doses annually, it imports the overwhelming majority of its supply.
Local manufacturers have struggled to scale up in part because they cannot secure the long-term purchase commitments that make large capital expenditures viable.
“These discussions with Aspen represent an important step towards translating Africa’s vaccine manufacturing ambitions into sustainable market realities,” Africa CDC director-general Dr Jean Kaseya said.
“Ultimately, this is about securing reliable access and supply security for the continent through African-led production.”
The framework under discussion would initially focus on priority vaccine antigens, with supply volumes potentially scaling to hundreds of millions of doses annually. Pricing would be benchmarked against competitive market rates to keep the arrangement sustainable for both buyers and producers.
Aspen, which has invested billions of rand in sterile manufacturing capacity in Gqeberha, said the agreement would address a challenge that nearly derailed its vaccine ambitions once before. The company suspended its Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing programme in 2022 after failing to secure sufficient purchase orders.
“We are able to make a meaningful contribution towards decreasing the dependency on global imports by providing vaccine solutions for all Africans,” Aspen CEO Stephen Saad said.
The company currently distributes medicines to more than 115 countries and says its supply chain infrastructure positions it to move vaccines efficiently across the continent.
The Africa CDC and Aspen said they would explore financing and risk-sharing arrangements, including through continental demand aggregation platforms and the African Pooled Procurement Mechanism, known as APPM.
Those tools are designed to aggregate purchasing power across member states, giving individual countries more leverage and manufacturers a clearer picture of total addressable demand.
The talks form part of a broader consultation process that the Africa CDC is conducting with manufacturers across vaccine development and the wider health products sector. The institution has framed local manufacturing capacity as central to its health security agenda, seeking to reduce the continent’s exposure to the kind of supply disruptions seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, when wealthy nations locked up global vaccine stocks.
• Business Day’s coverage of the Africa Forward Summit was made possible by the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.
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