Blended Financing, Vaccine Manufacturing and Procurement in Africa
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A continental blended-financing and pooled-procurement architecture for vaccine manufacturing and health-product sovereignty, built through AVATT, AVMA and the African Pooled Procurement Mechanism (APPM).
COVID-19 made a long-standing weakness impossible to ignore: Africa manufactured less than 1% of the vaccines it used, so African countries were pushed to the back of the global supply queue. The crisis triggered a coordinated response led by the African Union and Africa CDC that did not end with emergency procurement, but evolved into permanent structures aimed at health-product sovereignty. By 2025, commitments to vaccine manufacturing and procurement had passed USD 3.5 billion — one of the clearest areas of delivery against ALM Commitment 5, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Plan for Africa. The architecture rests on three pillars. AVATT, the Africa Vaccine Acquisition Task Team established in 2020 by President Cyril Ramaphosa as AU Chair, aggregated demand and negotiated procurement for AU Member States; an Afreximbank guarantee of USD 2 billion enabled the procurement of 400 million Johnson & Johnson doses manufactured principally at Aspen Pharmacare's Gqeberha facility in South Africa. AVMA, the African Vaccine Manufacturing Accelerator launched in Paris in June 2024 by Gavi, Africa CDC and France, secured USD 1.2 billion in commitments over ten years and pays African manufacturers milestone payments on WHO Pre-Qualification and per-dose accelerator payments on successful UNICEF tender awards. The African Pooled Procurement Mechanism, modelled on Egypt's Unified Procurement Authority, is being designed for ten priority RMNCAH products across ten pilot countries.
Policy Recommendations
Autonomy in aid management. AVATT demonstrated that African institutions can coordinate vaccine procurement with greater speed and alignment than donor-driven models. This is the conceptual foundation for ALM Commitment 2, leveraging international partners on African terms.
Market shaping is a prerequisite. Manufacturing capacity without guaranteed demand is unsustainable. AVMA and the APPM together create a demand–supply nexus that incentivises production, and the 2025 experience of Nigeria, Mozambique and Zambia shows procurement-conditionality is now being used bilaterally to demand local manufacturing.
Afreximbank has become a health finance institution. The USD 2 billion facility positions the bank as Africa's de facto health-security investment platform, complementing the AfDB role envisioned under ALM Commitment 2.
Blended finance is the scalable model. The 2026 Biovac package — EIB quasi-equity, IFC senior debt, a European Commission EFSD+ guarantee, Team Europe contributions and Gates Foundation support — is the reference architecture. Pure state investment and pure private investment both fail; blended finance with public-offtake guarantees is the winning structure.
Regulatory harmonisation is the bottleneck. Achieving WHO pre-qualification is the rate-limiting step for African manufacturers to receive AVMA milestone payments, which makes investment in regulatory-system strengthening — the African Medicines Agency, and SAHPRA's elevation to ICH — a prerequisite for continental manufacturing scale-up.
Key Numbers
Of its own vaccines Africa manufactured before COVID-19
USD committed to vaccine manufacturing and procurement by 2025
Health-product manufacturers identified across the continent
J&J doses procured through AVATT and made in South Africa
Key Findings
Total commitments to African vaccine manufacturing and procurement exceed USD 3.5 billion — AVMA USD 1.2 billion, Afreximbank USD 2 billion, and roughly USD 300 million from other development finance institutions.
Africa CDC's 2025 survey identified 574 health-product manufacturers across the continent, including 25 vaccine producers, 10 of them with WHO Pre-Qualification or in the pipeline.
AVMA targets support for at least four African manufacturers to win UNICEF tenders, producing more than 800 million doses over ten years across priority antigens including yellow fever, malaria, cholera, Ebola, measles–rubella and rotavirus.
Nine African companies are already producing vaccines, including Aspen and Biovac in South Africa, Institut Pasteur de Dakar in Senegal, BioNTech in Rwanda, Vacsera in Egypt and Biovaccines Nigeria.
The 2026 Dar es Salaam harmonisation of SADC Pooled Procurement Services is expected to cut essential-medicine prices by up to 40%.