10 Dec 2023

As Africa moves forward to tackle health challenges post COVID-19 era, it is critical to prioritise building strong African collaborations.

These were the sentiments of panelists at the just-ended 2023 Kusi Ideas Festival that was held in Gaborone.

With the continent having lost 200 000 lives to COVID-19, the panelists concurred that it was encouraging to participate in Africa’s renewed focus to take charge of its own health agenda through regional and international collaborations.

During the debate themed: Healthcare in Africa in the post COVID era, panellists were of the view that post COVID-19, Africa should ‘wake up from slumber’ and not only wait to respond to health emergencies.

To date, panellists said several initiatives had sprung up in the continent to support the efforts and strengthen countries’ health systems in order to prevent and mitigate the impact of health emergencies.

Pharmacist based in Botswana, Mr Stanley Mapiki reasoned that inter-regional cooperation was critical in finding solutions to problems that were unique to the continent.

He said it was important for Africa to harmonise processes through health regulatory instruments to ensure that synergies in pharmaceuticals were seamless, stating that medicines registered for use in Country A in Africa should also be registered for Country B for automatic reciprocity.

“In Botswana, currently we have partnerships with Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia (ZAZIBONA) to ensure medicines registered in any of those countries should be allowed by our medicine regulation bodies to quicken the process of gate keeping,” he said.

Mr Mapiki who is also a founder of a start-up manufacture of medicines said COVID-19 presented unprecedented challenges of distribution of medicines as large economies hoarded COVID vaccines ahead of time while smaller economies depended on the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access(COVAX) facility.

He said his start up to manufacture vaccines had received positive response from the European Union Market and that he had collaborations with other African countries such as Ghana and that the European Medicines Agency was ready to work with them. He said COVID-19 had  presented other emerging health problems as currently there were signs that the next potential pandemic was antimicrobial resistance due to the increase of use of antibiotics to treat COVID patients.
“As the continent we should be ahead of the game and plan for future pandemics and not to wait to response to problems,” he said.
Gambia based Managing Director of Make3D Company, Ms Fatuou Darboe argued that COVID-19 presented a new dawn for the continent that had borne the brunt of public health emergencies.
She said going forward, the continent should increase the pace of using technology in the midst of hardships.

Ms Darboe said in Gambia where almost everything was imported, the country came out of shells to look up for solutions.

“During COVID era, we partnered with other laboratories to ensure that our health sector thrives and the pandemic has taught us that we can solve anything. We collaborated with research councils to come up with devices and manufacturing PPEs, taught our staff members to contextualise use of technology and extend it to non-tech fields to make things universal,” she said

In that regard, she said the narrative of having to wait for things to happen so that the continent responds, should be a thing of the past.

Head and President of Novarties Sub Saharan Africa, Ms Racey Muchilwa was of the view that governments should prioritise financing health systems in order to coordinate response to health emergencies in own terms.

She said sufficiency in health financing and participation in global health matters was equally important.

Ms Muchilwa said during COVID-19, a lot of funds were converted to the pandemic while having to deal with other health problems such as TB, HIV and Malaria that should also be adequately catered for.

Rwanda based, Head of Logistics at Africa at Zipline, Mr Jack Ndahiro whose company made strides in delivering COVID-19 medical supplies through drones to rural areas, also stressed the importance of technology.

He said post COVID, Africa should be an export based economy in pharmaceuticals. ENDS