The global effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic has brought to the limelight the inequality in accessing pharmaceutical products between the more developed countries and the developing countries.
Kenya, like other African countries, relies heavily on imported drugs and pharmaceutical raw materials from other countries especially India, Malaysia, and China. This is despite the Kenya Government developing a package of incentives to enable local pharmaceutical manufacturing companies to survive competition from the international pharmaceutical companies who have dominated the market. The current government has highlighted the encouragement of local manufacturing as one of its “Big Four Agenda”. Whereas some positive things have happened in other sectors such as the cloth industry where more clothes are now being locally made, the pharmaceutical industry still lags behind.
The challenges facing the industry came to the fore with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. This caught all people flat-footed with a demand for supplies stretching most industries but more so the health industry. The need for pharmaceuticals was on a high not experienced previously across the globe.
As has been seen through the COVID-19 pandemic, the reliance on foreign countries for pharmaceutical products specifically and other products, in general, led to a serious medical crisis in the country and globally as COVID-19 vaccines and important raw materials for the manufacture of required medications became inaccessible as source countries sort to first deal with the crisis in their own countries.
It is high time that the Kenya Government specifically and African governments as a whole consider and act to bring more drug manufacturing to the region to reduce the risk of future shortages after the problems seen during the coronavirus crisis. Undoubtedly, dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic has placed a never before experienced strain on supplies of oxygen, intensive care medicine, over-the-counter drugs, various antibacterial, antifungal, and supplements such as Zinc, Calcium, and Vitamins. The service providers have been forced to import products at high rates to ensure they do not run out in an effort to save lives. This has translated to higher patients bills and a real strain towards achieving Universal Health Coverage.
Though gratefully the scenario in Kenya in terms of infections and mortality has not risen to the levels in other continents and countries, it is the right time to take stock and remain prepared not just for COVID-19 but also for other conditions for which we have relied on imports. From lessons learned there is now a more urgent call to develop grown workable strategies and solutions on how to develop local capacity especially in the manufacture of drugs. These are aimed at helping the country achieve economic autonomy and sustainable development in the pharmaceutical industry.
Local production of essential drugs is an important component of a long-term solution to the provision of adequate healthcare not only in Kenya but the region at large. As a country, Kenya has the capacity and capabilities for cost-effective local production of quality-assured, safe medical products, with the capacity to be a regional distributor of the same. This would reduce the dependability of imports, and to an extent buffer the industry and country from adverse effects if such catastrophes as COVID-19 were to happen in the future. Encouraging local production of high-quality generics would inevitably build local capacity and create job opportunities.
The process of achieving this would greatly depend of the national commitment and support to empower local manufacturing and where possible reduce and in some cases ban the importation of some pharmaceutical items and encourage their local manufacturing. This would not be peculiar to Kenya. For example, Nigeria and Ghana are on record of banning the importation of some drugs in an endeavor to combat falsified, substandard, and counterfeit pharmaceutical products, while encouraging building their local capacity.
