By Dheepak Maharajh.
Africa’s biotechnology debate is still dominated by a familiar list of shortages: too few laboratories, too little investment, too few industry-ready skills and too little manufacturing capacity.
Those gaps are real. But they are no longer the whole problem.
Africa can spend the next decade building laboratories, training scientists and financing manufacturing plants and still fall short of its bioeconomy ambitions if we fail to answer a more uncomfortable question: who is going to buy what we produce?
The vaccine sector makes the challenge especially clear. The African Union has set an ambition for the continent to produce at least 60% of its vaccine needs locally by 2040, from a historical base of roughly 1%. That is an enormous industrial leap. It will require capital, skills, technology transfer, regulatory capability and world-class manufacturing.
But none of those investments is sustainable without a market.
Manufacturing needs a demand signal
Biomanufacturing is not software. You cannot build cheaply, test the market and pivot every few weeks. A compliant production facility can require enormous upfront investment. Equipment is specialised, quality standards are stringent and regulatory approval takes time.
For an investor or manufacturer, the question is therefore not simply whether an African company can make a product. The question is whether, once it does, there will be predictable demand for that product.
This is where Africa risks creating a trap for itself. We want African manufacturers to compete at scale, but our procurement systems can continue to favour suppliers that already have scale. Local producers then struggle to win enough business to drive down costs, improve efficiency and reinvest. Their lack of scale becomes the reason they are not chosen, while not being chosen prevents them from achieving scale.
Aspen’s experience in 2022 shows why manufacturing capacity alone is not enough. After securing the rights to manufacture and sell Aspenovax, its own-branded version of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, the company struggled to secure orders. By May, COVAX had already secured its near-term supplies and said oversupply meant it had no immediate plans to buy from Aspen. The episode exposed a gap between the ambition to manufacture vaccines in Africa and the purchasing commitments needed to sustain that capacity.
That cycle will not fix itself.
Procurement is industrial policy
We need to start treating procurement as part of Africa’s industrial and innovation strategy, not as an administrative process that begins once the “real” development work is finished.
African manufacturers can meet world-class standards. Procurement should give them a fair opportunity to compete, with quality, safety and value for money at the heart of purchasing decisions.
It means recognising that purchasing rules shape markets.
Where credible African manufacturers meet the required standards, procurement policy can give them a meaningful route into African markets. Pooled purchasing can aggregate fragmented national demand. Long-term offtake arrangements can give manufacturers greater certainty. Preferential procurement can help a young industry reach the scale at which it becomes genuinely competitive.
Encouragingly, this thinking is moving into practice. Africa CDC’s African Pooled Procurement Mechanism is designed to aggregate demand across African Union member states while strengthening local manufacturing. Gavi’s African Vaccine Manufacturing Accelerator similarly uses downstream “pull” incentives to help create a commercially sustainable vaccine manufacturing sector.
These mechanisms matter because they tackle a problem that grants, training programmes and new facilities cannot solve on their own: demand predictability.
Build the whole chain
At UVU Bio, we see the same challenge much earlier in the innovation pipeline.
We can lower the cost of experimentation by giving entrepreneurs and scientists access to advanced laboratory infrastructure they could not afford to build themselves. We can help graduates move from academic knowledge to practical competence on sophisticated equipment. We can support scientists who need to think beyond publication and towards product development, commercialisation and entrepreneurship.
These interventions remove real bottlenecks. But they do not create an economy by themselves.
A founder can have excellent science and still fail if there is no route to market. A graduate can become technically capable and still struggle if the companies that should employ them are not growing. A manufacturing plant can meet the highest standards and still become an expensive monument if buyers continue sourcing almost everything elsewhere.
That is why Africa’s bioeconomy has to be built as a connected system: science, skills, infrastructure, finance, regulation, manufacturing and markets.
Miss one link and the rest of the investment becomes weaker.
The next phase of Africa’s biotechnology story should therefore be less about proving that African capability exists. It does. The question is whether we are prepared to organise our markets around that capability.
If we are serious about health sovereignty, procurement cannot be an afterthought. Governments, development partners, regulators and large buyers need to align the things they say they want Africa to produce with the things they are ultimately prepared to buy.
Africa’s biotech future will not be secured simply because we learned to make more here.
It will be secured when African science can move all the way from the laboratory to a sustainable market – and when African demand becomes one of the forces that helps African industry grow.
Dheepak Maharajh is the CEO, UVU Bio.