Made in Africa Shields: Building Factories That Protect Lives and Power Jobs. by Ethiopis Tafara Vice President for Africa, International Finance Corporation, World Bank Group
In Diamniadio, just outside Dakar, something quietly consequential is taking shape, writes Ethiopis Tafara.
Steel is rising. Clean rooms are being mapped. A multi‑vaccine manufacturing facility is moving from blueprint to reality.
The project is called Madiba. Led by the Institut Pasteur de Dakar and financed by the World Bank Group and other development finance institutions, it is built for scale. At full capacity, Madiba is expected to produce up to 300 million vaccine doses each year. That figure is more than a statistic. It is a signal that a continent long dependent on imported protection is beginning to build its own.
Africa’s health vulnerability is structural and it becomes most visible when global markets tighten and supply chains fracture. Today, between 80 and 99 percent of vaccines used across Africa are imported. Only six percent of medical supplies and 10 percent of pharmaceuticals are produced locally.
When that dependence collides with disruption, the consequences are not abstract. Parents struggle to find routine immunizations for their children. Clinics ration supplies. Health workers are asked to protect communities without the tools they need like firefighters sent toward a blaze with empty hoses.
Expanding local production, then, is about health resilience. But it is also about building the systems that make resilience durable: regulators that can certify quality, procurement systems that create credible demand, logistics networks that deliver reliably, and manufacturing platforms that can compete.
And it is critically about jobs.
Over the next quarter century, Sub‑Saharan Africa’s working‑age population will grow by more than 600 million people. By 2050, the region will need to create roughly 25 million jobs each year. No serious strategy for Africa’s future can ignore that arithmetic.
Health manufacturing can be part of the answer. It can help meet the jobs challenge while advancing the African Union’s ambition to ensure 60 percent of the vaccines, medicines, and diagnostics used in Africa are made in Africa by 2040. The opportunity is real—but the pathway is not automatic.
Today, Africa has roughly 700 medical product manufacturers. Many are constrained by limited scale, narrow product portfolios, weak regulatory capacity, and uneven quality control. Too often, firms are asked to compete while carrying weights that other markets removed long ago.
That is why the World Bank Group is prioritizing pharmaceutical and medical manufacturing across key markets, including Senegal, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Egypt, and Moroccounder the AIM2030 initiative announced in Nairobi this week.
Working with partners, the approach is straightforward.
First, build the infrastructure serious manufacturing requires power, water, transport, industrial platforms, and technical capacity.
Second, advance policies, reforms, and funding programs that reward quality and scale rather than improvisation.
Third, use those foundations to mobilize private capital because manufacturing is not a pilot project. It is an industry. And industries scale when investors have the confidence to stay.
This is where IFC, The World Bank Group ’s private‑sector arm, plays a direct role working with companies and investors to finance projects, structure transactions, and mobilize capital at scale. If Africa is to participate in the global health economy not as a passenger, but as a co‑author, it must build platforms that allow firms to compete, comply, and grow.
Ethiopia and South Africa show what this looks like in practice.
In Ethiopia, pharmaceutical manufacturing is being anchored around Kilinto, a 270‑hectare pharmaceutical park outside Addis Ababa designed for large‑scale production. During the COVID‑19 pandemic, dependence proved costly: insulin prices rose by 130 percent, and more than half of primary health facilities reported vaccine stockouts.
Since then, regulatory reform and private investment have begun to reshape the sector. Industrial parks like Kilinto now account for as many as one in seven new formal private‑sector jobs, many filled by young women entering the workforce for the first time. At this pace, Ethiopia could add over 50,000 pharmaceutical manufacturing jobs by 2030, while growing exports to $900 million by 2028, up from $760 million in 2023.
In South Africa, the investment case is moving further up the value chain. Biovac, the country’s leading vaccine manufacturer, is expanding beyond fill‑and‑finish into deeper production capability, including work on South Africa’s first domestically developed oral cholera vaccine. IFC’s financing and project support for a new multi‑vaccine facility in Cape Town should enable an additional 250 million doses per year.
Aspen Pharmacare shows what sustained backing can achieve. IFC‑led DFI financing packages—€600 million in 2021 and a further €500 million in 2024—are supporting expanded vaccine production, sterile injectables, and critical medicines, including insulin and pediatric vaccines.
These are not isolated successes. They are signals of what becomes possible when countries move from dependence to capability when they stop importing only the end product and start building the means of production.
The lesson is clear: systems scale, not slogans. Pharmaceutical manufacturing grows when capital, regulation, procurement, infrastructure, skills, and market size move together—as a coordinated whole.
Manufacturing is not just an engineering challenge. It is a trust challenge: trust in standards, regulation, procurement, payment, and governance and confidence that the rules will hold.
Get that right, and Africa will increasingly produce the health products it needs, improve them, and export them too. The result will be stronger health security, a more competitive industrial base, and thousands of skilled jobs in a sector with every reason to grow.
Ethiopis Tafara, Vice President for Africa, International Finance Corporation, World Bank Group
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