Africa Medicine Roadmap: Paving the Way for Sustainable Access to Quality Pharmaceuticals

The WHO Regional Office for Africa launched a 10-year roadmap (2025-2034) that ensures sustainable access to affordable, safe, and quality medicines while tackling high costs, supply chain issues, and substandard products. The Africa medicine roadmap builds on the African Medicines Agency (AMA), promoting regulatory harmonization and local manufacturing while also fostering equitable procurement through collaboration among member states, partners, and regional communities. Ultimately, the roadmap supports universal health coverage and reduces health inequities through targeted strategies.

Africa currently imports over 90% of its essential medicines, which causes dependency, high prices, and shortages. The Africa medicine roadmap prioritizes local production and uses pooled procurement to cut costs by 30-50% while targeting key therapeutic areas. Meanwhile, the AMA harmonizes regulations across 55 states, fast-tracking approvals and quality assurance, and the plan fights antimicrobial resistance by improving surveillance and generic access. Regional manufacturing could create thousands of jobs, stimulate economic growth, and position Africa’s $30 billion pharma market to go global by 2034.

This roadmap could lower costs on imported drugs, allowing African health systems to save billions yearly that could go to primary care, much like Asia’s WHO initiatives improved cost-effectiveness by 25% via local production. AMA data platforms will track access and quality, creating evidence for health tech assessments and supporting value-based pricing, while patient outcomes improve with less death from HIV, TB, and malaria. In turn, pharma jobs will boost GDP and supply chains, informing global HEOR for low-resource areas and cutting stockout losses of $5-10 billion yearly.