AFRICA – The African Development Bank Group and the Islamic Development Bank have signed a joint partnership action plan for the development of the pharmaceutical industry sector within their African member countries.

The plan offers a new framework for strengthened cooperation and mutual development priorities, with a strong emphasis on boosting the continent’s health defence systems. 

The Joint Action Plan enables both institutions to grow a shared pipeline of bankable projects around key complementary themes to which each institution would bring their comparative advantage.

The plan covers lending to public and private sector projects and pharmaceutical development projects using a regional approach.

“The African Development Bank Group places considerable importance on partnerships in its contributions to sustainable development in Africa,” said Solomon Quaynor, Vice President of Infrastructure, Private Sector and Industrialization.

“Through partnership we can go further, we can increase development effectiveness, we can leverage our complementarities and harness our synergies.”

In addition to defining a joint action plan, Anasse Aissami, IsDB Director General, Country Programs, encouraged the participants to expedite implementation of the respective pharmaceutical programs with focus on increasing local production and regulatory support.

Amer Bukvic, Acting Director General, Global Practices and Partnerships, seconded his remarks, adding that: “we will solidly establish and operationalize the health and pharmaceutical collaboration, and we will work hard to enhance the technical cooperation”.  

“There is room to extend our partnership under the umbrella of the existing MoU to our priority sectors,” Desire Vencatachellum, Director, Financial Mobilization and Partnerships for the African Development Bank noted during the meetings.

Following the signing, Dia, highlighted the need to increase cooperation across all human development sectors and initiatives, given the strong strategic and operational alignment between the IsDB and the African Development Bank across the health, pharmaceutical, education, water and sanitation sectors.

The teams will continue to meet monthly to review progress and share insights on proposed common projects. They also announced that they would hold a review meeting before December 2023 to assess the progress of sovereign and non-sovereign projects.

Global Pharmaceutical Business Forum

The institutions will also cooperate on the organization of a global Pharmaceutical Business Forum in May 2023 at the General Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank.

The event will bring together key pharmaceutical sector industry captains, including big pharma companies, continental, regional and governmental regulatory agencies, technology transfer entities.

The gathering will deliberate on business opportunities, vaccine off-take agreements, pharmaceutical technology transfer agreements and project preparation resources, among other topics.

In 2017, heads of the two institutions signed a co-financing Memorandum of Understanding to scale up co-financing activities over the period 2018-2020. A sum of $2 billion was earmarked for co-financing, equally split between the two institutions.

The MoU was extended to December 2023 in order to intensify co-financing across strategic sectors such as infrastructure development; human development; private sector development and investment promotion.

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