• News
    • Latest news
    • News search
    • Health
    • Finance
    • Food
    • Career news
    • Content series
    • Try Devex Pro
  • Jobs
    • Job search
    • Post a job
    • Employer search
    • CV Writing
    • Upcoming career events
    • Try Career Account
  • Funding
    • Funding search
    • Funding news
  • Talent
    • Candidate search
    • Devex Talent Solutions
  • Events
    • Upcoming and past events
    • Partner on an event
  • Post a job
  • About
      • About us
      • Membership
      • Newsletters
      • Advertising partnerships
      • Devex Talent Solutions
      • Contact us
Join DevexSign in
Join DevexSign in

News

  • Latest news
  • News search
  • Health
  • Finance
  • Food
  • Career news
  • Content series
  • Try Devex Pro

Jobs

  • Job search
  • Post a job
  • Employer search
  • CV Writing
  • Upcoming career events
  • Try Career Account

Funding

  • Funding search
  • Funding news

Talent

  • Candidate search
  • Devex Talent Solutions

Events

  • Upcoming and past events
  • Partner on an event
Post a job

About

  • About us
  • Membership
  • Newsletters
  • Advertising partnerships
  • Devex Talent Solutions
  • Contact us
  • My Devex
  • Update my profile % complete
  • Account & privacy settings
  • My saved jobs
  • Manage newsletters
  • Support
  • Sign out
Latest newsNews searchHealthFinanceFoodCareer newsContent seriesTry Devex Pro
    Sponsored Content
    U.S. Pharmacopeia
    • Opinion
    • Sponsored by USP

    Opinion: Africa-led solutions to expedite access to COVID-19 vaccines

    Delays of 10-20 years have occurred with the rollout of previous vaccines in Africa. How could stronger cross-continental regulatory collaboration reduce that timeline for COVID-19 vaccines? USP explains.

    By Nagesh Borse, Mwemezi Ngemera // 09 December 2020
    USP explains how cross-continental regulatory collaboration could reduce the rollout timeline for COVID-19 vaccines.

    With promising results from three major COVID-19 vaccine trials and potentially more to come, it’s becoming clear that access to coronavirus vaccines will soon become reality. But despite unprecedented global pushes to ensure access for low- and middle-income countries, the majority of available vaccine doses have been earmarked for wealthy countries that have the political and financial capital to make direct agreements with pharmaceutical companies.

    Currently, vaccines for approximately 250 million people have been secured through COVAX, an unprecedented effort to make access more equitable for all countries. However, several high-income countries are making arrangements outside of the COVAX Facility, which will mean that COVAX is likely to fall well short of the required doses to vaccinate high-risk populations in Africa, let alone achieve herd immunity among the continent’s population of 1.3 billion.

    Unfortunately, we’ve seen this scenario play out before. When new antiretrovirals were developed to treat the HIV epidemic, it took seven years before they were widely available throughout the African continent. Delays of 10-20 years were also seen with the rollout of hepatitis B, rotavirus, and other vaccines, in part due to weak and fragmented regulatory systems that caused delays in approvals and increased the cost of scaling up new health technologies.

    A similar delay in access to COVID-19 vaccines would not only jeopardize health in African nations and other LMICs but would also hamstring the global response elsewhere.

    The future of health and medicine in low- and middle-income countries

    To fight COVID-19 and other health issues, people must trust that vaccines, medicines, and other medical products are quality-assured and can be available at scale worldwide. Devex looks at what it takes for cutting-edge innovations to deliver on the promise of a healthier future.

    To be sure, COVAX and other initiatives will play a critical role in expediting the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines in Africa, at least initially. However, the mechanism is not meant to be a long-term solution to solve the access gap for LMICs. What’s more, current COVAX commitments — as well as overall global manufacturing capacity for COVID-19 vaccines — are well short of meeting the vaccination needs across the African continent.

    It’s long past time that we act collectively to close the access gap for African countries, as well as other LMICs. And with greater collaboration, scale-up of innovations, and continued progress on more sustainable solutions, we have the tools to do it.

    Cross-continental regulatory collaboration

    There are practical and proactive steps that governments and their medicines regulatory authorities can take now to pave the way for expedited approvals and registration of COVID-19 vaccines. This will only be achieved with more effective collaboration across regulatory authorities with other in-country national counterparts and immunization programs.

    Given that most regulatory authorities in Africa lack the technical know-how to fully evaluate or approve vaccine products, the current pandemic should act as a catalyst for enhanced regulatory reliance and mutual recognition so that product application information and inspection findings can be shared readily and easily across regulators simultaneously. Requiring manufacturers to approach and file applications with separate authorities has been a major cause of delays in the rollouts of past innovations.

    Regulators can also ensure processes for emergency use authorization are up to date, clear, and ready to initiate quickly for COVID-19 vaccines, and they can understand what steps need to be taken if the World Health Organization issues an emergency use listing. This would include collaborating with the national immunization programs, the national pandemic response teams, and public and private health system stakeholders in their countries to introduce vaccines, facilitate access, and foster trust in their communities.

    Regulatory authorities can collaborate and share information more effectively through active and engaged participation in regional and continental harmonization initiatives such as the African Vaccine Regulatory Forum, which established a joint review procedure in 2017 to address similar regulatory challenges during an Ebola outbreak.

    When individual regulators participate in and accept the results of joint product application reviews, it helps build the capacity of participating regulators while also consolidating the review and approval process, both of which pay dividends in faster approval times and thereby faster access to emergency, lifesaving products. Donors and implementing partners can support this effort by sharing up-to-date information and training opportunities on good manufacturing practices and other topics that help sharpen the skills of participating regulators.

    Actions that African governments take today will not only enable a sustainable and quality-assured supply of efficacious vaccines to fight the pandemic but will also help maintain public trust.

    —

    Fostering public trust

    Lessons from polio and Ebola containment efforts have taught us that accelerated access to new technologies must also be accompanied by efforts to ensure that these products are made available in ways that foster and maintain public trust. Clear and transparent regulatory processes — along with effective and deliberate communication about approvals, availability, and even potential risks and early engagement of local community leaders — are critical ways for governments to achieve this.

    Additionally, with access to new technologies comes the ethical and public health imperative to ensure they continue to work as intended in real-world settings by assessing quality and safety through post-marketing surveillance and pharmacovigilance programs, respectively. Here, again, regional collaboration and harmonization are helping to scale these critical programs on the continent.

    For example, with support from the U.S. Agency for International Development and technical assistance from USP, the East African community completed — and publicly released the results of — a first-of-its-kind regional post-marketing surveillance survey, paving the way for similar efforts in the future.

    Similarly, the African Medicines Quality Forum, a technical working group of the African Union Development Agency, is a continental collaborative that helps national quality control laboratories strengthen their capacity for medicines quality testing and helps prevent falsified and substandard medicines from reaching consumers.

    Continuing to strengthen these locally led efforts is critical as part of the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines since fraudulent vaccines have already been found in several countries.

    Looking at long-term solutions

    With support from global partners, many African nations are strengthening collaboration and systems that allow for greater bargaining power through pooled procurement and advanced purchasing commitments. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa — with support from USP — is working with the African small island states to pioneer a joint framework for pooled procurement that incentivizes procurement from quality-assured local manufacturers.

    As pooled procurement arrangements and expanded local vaccine manufacturing become central strategies for ensuring sustainable access for Africa, medicines regulatory authorities must proactively put in place policies, regulations, and enforcement measures to help ensure the quality of locally produced products and ensure that poor-quality alternatives are not undercutting the potential market for these products locally, regionally, and internationally.

    In both the short term and long term, actions that African governments take today will not only enable a sustainable and quality-assured supply of efficacious vaccines to fight the pandemic but will also help maintain public trust. Past pandemics have shown that these actions, collaborations, and investments pay off. It’s time for Africa-led collaboratives to be at the heart of not only the current pandemic response but future ones as well.

    • Global Health
    • Trade & Policy
    Printing articles to share with others is a breach of our terms and conditions and copyright policy. Please use the sharing options on the left side of the article. Devex Pro members may share up to 10 articles per month using the Pro share tool ( ).
    The views in this opinion piece do not necessarily reflect Devex's editorial views.

    About the authors

    • Nagesh Borse

      Nagesh Borse

      Dr. Nagesh Borse has more than 20 years of global health, development, and pharmaceutical sector experience and is currently the technical director of the Global Health Technical Program at USP. Before joining USP, Borse served as acting director for the USAID Global Health Supply Chain project, where he managed the delivery of HIV/AIDS commodities to over 60 countries. Previously, he worked under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, first as a senior health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and later as a technical advisor at USAID’s Office of HIV/AIDS.
    • Mwemezi Ngemera

      Mwemezi Ngemera

      Mwemezi Ngemera is a pharmacist and public health specialist with 20 years of experience working in Africa with government authorities and international nongovernmental organizations. He is the Africa regional lead with USP, working to improve the availability of safe, effective, and quality-assured medicines and related medical products on the continent.

    Search for articles

    Related Stories

    Global HealthAfrica’s vaccine manufacturing ambitions get a boost with new partnerships

    Africa’s vaccine manufacturing ambitions get a boost with new partnerships

    Global healthOpinion: Trump aid shock underscores need for more made-in-Africa medicine

    Opinion: Trump aid shock underscores need for more made-in-Africa medicine

    Global HealthOpinion: Ensuring oxygen access is essential to achieving health for all

    Opinion: Ensuring oxygen access is essential to achieving health for all

    Sponsored by Gates FoundationOpinion: Enlightened self-interest demands global health investments

    Opinion: Enlightened self-interest demands global health investments

    Most Read

    • 1
      The power of diagnostics to improve mental health
    • 2
      Lasting nutrition and food security needs new funding — and new systems
    • 3
      Opinion: Urgent action is needed to close the mobile gender gap
    • 4
      Supporting community-driven solutions to address breast cancer
    • 5
      The top local employers in Europe
    • News
    • Jobs
    • Funding
    • Talent
    • Events

    Devex is the media platform for the global development community.

    A social enterprise, we connect and inform over 1.3 million development, health, humanitarian, and sustainability professionals through news, business intelligence, and funding & career opportunities so you can do more good for more people. We invite you to join us.

    • About us
    • Membership
    • Newsletters
    • Advertising partnerships
    • Devex Talent Solutions
    • Post a job
    • Careers at Devex
    • Contact us
    © Copyright 2000 - 2025 Devex|User Agreement|Privacy Statement