Dr. Jean Kaseya, Director General of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), is leading the most ambitious health sovereignty campaign in the continent's history, rallying African governments, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and development partners around a single transformative target: producing 60 percent of the vaccines Africa uses domestically by 2040. Africa currently manufactures just one percent of the vaccines it consumes, leaving 1.5 billion people dangerously dependent on global supply chains that proved catastrophically fragile during the COVID-19 pandemic, when wealthy nations secured the bulk of available doses while African countries waited for months.
The initiative gained decisive institutional backing at the 37th African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, where leaders approved a continent-wide pooled procurement system designed to guarantee predictable demand for locally manufactured medical products — one of the key conditions that pharmaceutical investors require before committing capital to African production facilities. Africa CDC is coordinating the programme, working with existing manufacturers in South Africa, Egypt, Senegal, Rwanda, and Morocco, while identifying new production hubs in Nigeria and Kenya that could come online before 2030. An estimated USD 3 billion in investment is required to build the manufacturing capacity needed to meet the 2040 target.
The urgency of the campaign was underscored by two concurrent controversies that captured international attention in February 2026. Guinea-Bissau suspended a US-funded hepatitis B vaccine trial pending further technical review, following a determination by the World Health Organization that the study's design — which withheld birth-dose vaccination from some newborns — was ethically unacceptable. In Mozambique, a separate but more hopeful development emerged: for the first time in over three years, global cholera vaccine supplies increased sufficiently to allow the government to restart preventive vaccination campaigns, even as the country faced an active cholera epidemic and severe floods that had displaced over 700,000 people.
For African public health experts, both stories illustrate the same fundamental vulnerability: a continent that depends on others for vaccines, trial data, and supply chains will always be at the mercy of others' priorities. "Africa must stop begging for its own medicine," Dr. Kaseya told a continental health ministers' forum in Addis Ababa. "The next pandemic will not wait for us to negotiate access." The Africa CDC's local manufacturing roadmap, backed by the African Union and increasingly supported by the World Health Organization's push to redistribute global pharmaceutical production, represents the continent's most credible effort yet to build health infrastructure that can sustain a population expected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050.
