Rwanda is set to host the headquarters of the African Medicines Agency, (RMA) the African Union announced on Friday last week.

The decision was arrived at during the meeting of the AU Executive Council during the just concluded African Union Fourth Mid-Year Coordination meeting in Lusaka.

Represented by Minister of Foreign Affairs Dr Vincent Biruta, Rwanda was selected from a pool of final eight countries that had expressed interest in hosting the agency’s headquarters.

The agency becomes the second specialized health agency of the AU after the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), based in Addis Ababa.

"Happy the AU Executive Council meeting in Lusaka has just voted Rwanda to host the African Medicines Agency (AMA). Thanks for all member states who supported Rwanda,” Biruta commented.

The development comes more than a decade after the idea for AMA was broached.

However, the race to establish the agency comes after the Covid-19 pandemic exposed the continent’s dependence on imported vaccines and other pharmaceuticals.

For instance, just over 5% of medicines and 1% of vaccines consumed by the population of 1.2 billion people are produced locally, according to reports by the AU.

Equally important is the increased risk of disease outbreaks in the region and globally, making access to medical products along with a harmonized regulatory environment a priority across African countries.

Limited resources contribute to poor regulatory outcomes across the continent. 

Experts argue that AMA can help Africa leapfrog from low existing levels of regulatory capacity to a regional harmonized approach. 

The World Health Organization estimates that only seven percent of African countries had moderate capacity for medicines regulation and more than 90 percent had minimal to no capacity. 

General resource shortages also contribute to the highest regional prevalence of substandard and falsified medicines.

By supporting capacity building and harmonizing standards and processes, AMA can help strengthen medicines regulation amidst resource constraints.

Big deal for Rwanda

According to Zachee Iyakaremye, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Health, the agency is expected to support the growth of local pharmaceutical production, evaluate medical products for the treatment of priority diseases as determined by the AU and regularly inspect, coordinate and share information about products that are authorized for marketing.

"It carries various benefits for the continent but also for our market including fostering coordination in national and regional regulatory efforts and also support local manufacturing and pharmacy.”

Iyakaremye also stressed that this will further strengthen Rwanda’s act against substandard and falsified medicines.

AMA will also support the creation of an enabling environment for pharmaceutical manufacturing on the continent, the African Union said in a statement.

The agency’s management is set to be announced in November this year, The New Times has learnt.

Hosting AMA comes at a time Rwanda is investing in local vaccine manufacturing, an attempt of achieving vaccine equity on the continent.

Just recently, President Paul Kagame led the ceremony to break ground for the construction of the BioNTech vaccine manufacturing plant in Kigali that will promote scalable mRNA vaccine production in Africa.