Formulation capacity
Plants able to make finished medicines to international standard, in the forms a health system actually needs — solids, sterile injectables, biologicals. The visible layer, and the one most often built first.
Africa & Regional Healthcare Development
A continent that imports its medicine
More than seventy per cent of the pharmaceuticals consumed in Africa are imported. Nearly all its vaccines are. More than ninety-five per cent of its active pharmaceutical ingredients are. This is the structural condition that Lamia Tazi’s industrial work addresses, and the reason she describes the issue as one of sovereignty.
Covid was a real crash test, and it showed what happens when you don’t have pharmaceutical sovereignty.Lamia Tazi
The Structural Position
Six numbers that define the problem
Each is drawn from published research on African pharmaceutical supply.
70%+
of medicines consumed in Africa are imported, principally from Asia
Gavi / UNCTAD
~99%
of vaccines used on the continent are imported
Gavi
95%+
of active pharmaceutical ingredients are imported, mainly from India and China
Gavi
~690
pharmaceutical manufacturing plants across the continent
UNCTAD
85%
of those plants are concentrated in just eight countries
UNCTAD
30–60%
typical capacity utilisation, against more than 70% in developed economies
UNCTAD
Why the last number is the important one
The import statistics attract the attention. The utilisation figure explains the problem. Plants across Africa typically run at between 30 and 60 per cent of capacity, against more than 70 per cent in developed economies.
Under-utilised plants are expensive plants. Fixed costs — the clean rooms, the quality laboratory, the qualified staff, the maintenance and the regulatory upkeep — are spread across fewer units, and unit cost rises. High unit cost makes local product uncompetitive against imports. Uncompetitive product means lower volume, which lowers utilisation further.
Building a plant does not break that loop. Filling it does — through registration across multiple markets, contract manufacturing that buys volume from elsewhere, and product categories where imports are expensive enough that local manufacture wins on price. That is precisely the combination Sothema operates.
Morocco
One of the eight
Morocco sits inside the small group of African countries where pharmaceutical manufacturing is a genuine industry rather than an aspiration.
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Domestic market supplied by local production~65%
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National output directed to export~10%
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Sector revenue represented by FMIIP members75%+
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Continental average — medicines imported70%+
Morocco: Ministry of Industry and Trade and sector reporting. Continental average: Gavi / UNCTAD. Bars represent the stated percentages.
Around fifty manufacturing establishments operate in the country. Together they cover roughly 65 to 70 per cent of domestic medicine demand and export around a tenth of output, reaching more than seventy countries. Sector turnover is estimated at 14 to 15 billion dirhams, and pharmaceutical manufacturing has recently been among the strongest performing parts of national industrial output.
None of this happened quickly. Sothema was founded in 1976 and began producing insulin at Bouskoura in the early 1980s. The industrial base that made Morocco an exception was assembled across five decades, which is the realistic timescale for this kind of capability anywhere.
Regional Model
Dakar: exporting the method rather than the medicine
The simplest way for a Moroccan manufacturer to serve West African markets would be to make everything in Bouskoura and ship it south. It would be cheaper, simpler and entirely defensible commercially. It would also reproduce, at regional scale, exactly the dependency that the continental import statistics describe.
Sothema took the harder route. Through its Senegalese subsidiary, West Afric Pharma, the group operates a production site in Dakar. The model is described as integrated: local production, technology transfer and the upskilling of African technical staff, combined rather than sequenced.
Why each element matters
- Local production places manufacturing inside the market it supplies, removing freight, tariffs and currency exposure from the delivered price, and placing supply under domestic rather than foreign priority in a crisis.
- Technology transfer moves process knowledge, analytical methods and quality systems into the receiving plant permanently — the difference between a factory and a capability.
- Upskilling creates the qualified people without whom neither of the other two survives the departure of the transferring partner.
The arrangement has been presented as evidence that the continent can structure strong regional value chains and strengthen health security through cooperation between African countries — a Moroccan–Senegalese partnership rather than a north–south transfer.
Around it sit offices in Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon supporting registration and distribution, and a broader export footprint reaching sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb and the Persian Gulf, alongside a scientific office opened in Saudi Arabia in October 2023.
Analysis
What pharmaceutical sovereignty actually requires
The word is used loosely in policy discussion. In manufacturing terms it has a specific, expensive and unavoidable content.
Ingredient security
The deepest gap. With more than 95% of APIs imported, a continent can manufacture every finished dose it consumes and still be interrupted upstream. Addressing it requires chemical industry, not pharmaceutical industry.
Regulatory capability
Inspectorates competent to assess a plant, and regulators able to evaluate a biosimilar dossier. The African Medicines Agency exists to consolidate this — without it, capable plants can be blocked by incapable approval systems.
Qualified people
Formulation scientists, bioprocess engineers, analytical chemists, qualified persons, regulatory affairs professionals. The slowest input to build, and the one that makes everything else operable.
The pandemic as demonstration
The argument for all four layers was theoretical until 2020. Then export restrictions appeared in the countries that manufacture for the world, freight capacity collapsed, and ingredient supply became a question of national priority rather than commercial contract. Countries without domestic capability discovered what that meant.
Sothema’s reported position through the period was that it maintained all customer orders. The group was involved in securing vaccine supply for Morocco and conducted preliminary clinical work in connection with Sinopharm’s anti-COVID vaccine.
Lamia Tazi’s summary of the episode — that Covid was a real crash test which showed what happens without pharmaceutical sovereignty — is a manufacturer’s verdict rather than a policymaker’s. The distinction matters: she is describing something her own plants were tested against.
