Nigerian Drug Companies Get WHO Approval to Create 260,000 Jobs
The six Nigerian pharmaceutical firms set for pre-qualification by the World Health Organisation (WHO) would create at least 260,000 jobs and save the country over N12 billion used annually to procure drugs from foreign firms.
The six drug firms include Evans Pharmaceuticals, SWIPHA, CHI Pharmaceuticals, May & Baker, and Fidson HealthCare.
The Guardian also reliably gathered that the Federal Ministry of Health has contacted the Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiative (GAVI) for the possibility of starting vaccine manufacture in Nigeria as the National Agency for Food, Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) is working hard to encourage the citing of vaccine production plant in Africa. It was learnt that the ministry is presently rehabilitating and refurbishing the defunct yellow fever vaccine production plant in Yaba, Lagos.
Minister of Health, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, told The Guardian that “there are three large laboratories in the world that manufacture these vaccines, but none of them is located in Africa.
“We need to have it manufactured in Africa. I call on the 54 countries in Africa to set up this dynamism to manufacture these vaccines. We should talk about manufacturing vaccine and of course in partnership. We need to get out of this great dependency we have on medications and particularly on vaccines.”
Chukwu also said there was need to strengthen routine immunisation as synchronization, noting that mass campaigns were not enough to solve the problems of vaccine preventable diseases such as polio.
Director General of NAFDAC, Dr. Paul Orhii, said: “The implications of WHO pre-qualified pharmaceutical firms are huge for Nigeria. We have a population of 160 million people, currently we depend largely on imports; almost 70 per cent of essential medicines imported from other countries.
“With the pre-qualification, our companies will expand both in size and quality to meet international standards and Nigeria can become self sufficient in the supply of good quality essential medicines approved by the WHO.
“I think that has a huge implication also on the economy; these companies expanding in size will begin to export some of their products to some other countries and they will create, by our calculation, almost 260,000 good quality jobs.”
Orhii said Nigeria was taking the lead in the implementation of a draft resolution by the African Region on “Business Plan for Pharmaceutical Industry in Africa.”
He explained: “You know in that area, Nigeria has gone a step further than most of other African countries. You are aware of our efforts, we got 11 pharmaceutical manufacturing companies in Nigeria. We brought them here, to Geneva, and they got expert advice from the WHO. They have gone back, the WHO selected seven of them, they sent their experts to come and evaluate them and about six of them have prospects for getting WHO-prequalification for their products within the next two years. Actually two might actually get this year.
“So I think it is a huge step forward especially considering the fact that on the whole of the African continent currently, we have only three such companies that have products that are WHO-pre-qualified. We have one in South Africa, one in Uganda and one in Morocco and right now Nigeria, within the next two years, might get six companies getting their products pre-qualified. It shows that we started late but once we have started, we take our leadership position on the African continent on having companies that have products that are WHO pre-qualified.”
Source: Guardian Nigeria
