Online Reporter
The State health sector, with all its hospitals and clinics, is not just the largest single buyer of essential medicines and consumables, but buys more than everyone else combined.
So it assumes the biggest potential market for locally manufactured drugs, or at least the essential and life-saving medicines.
The sector is supplied via NatPharm, which went through some remarkable challenges before the Second Republic tackled this particular State-owned entity, as it did other critical State concerns and parastatals.
After the major clean-up and reforms, NatPharm operates properly and efficiently, with some very tight accounting and financial policies. These are necessary to maintain the efficiency and making sure that the medicines and consumables it sells are always available.
But that left very little scope for encouraging the growth of the local pharmaceutical industry beyond offering a market for what the private sector companies were already producing and delivering using their own resources.
Now that is changing. The Government has allocated US$10 million to NatPharm which will form a revolving fund for procurement.
This should allow manufacturing companies some extra cashflow upfront to procure equipment and raw materials that cannot yet be made in Zimbabwe and then to manufacture new products and obtain the necessary, indeed vital, licences from the Medicines Control Authority of Zimbabwe.
That cannot be an instant process considering that the authority will demand samples already made for its own rigorous testing and will want to inspect the manufacturing process to ensure that when it does licence a product it not just meets every pharmaceutical safety standard, but will continue to meet these.
So the revolving fund will make the accelerated expansion of the local pharmaceutical manufacturing much easier.
We need to note that NatPharm also has responsibility for ensuring that patients get a good deal and are not paying some exorbitant price for registered medicines that can be imported more cheaply.
There are no customs or excise duties on imported medicines so the local industry has to be able to compete on price as well as quality.
At one stage Zimbabwe did have a flourishing local pharmaceutical industry.
But this was based within the closed economy created in the mid-1960s where the main criterion was cutting back on foreign currency use, rather than on viable business in a competitive environment.
Other financial woes, and sometimes inefficient management of the local manufacturing companies, all cut back on production.
Under the Second Republic there has been renewed growth in this sector, this time built upon sound business requirements, and a growing number of the most common medicines are now in production within Zimbabwe.
The Medicines Control Authority of Zimbabwe has also been upgraded, and it is now the first regulator in Africa to attain Maturity Level Four.
It has to be continually stressed that local manufacturers of medicines cannot take shortcuts and regardless of anything else they have to meet the highest quality standards.
The authority has the responsibility for ensuring this local meeting of standards, since it cannot rely on a respectable foreign regulator as it can with imported medicines.
The Ministry of Industry and Commerce, which has a prime responsibility for upgrading local industry, has been helping, first by setting up a meeting which brought together the Ministry of Health and Child Care, NatPharm, the Medicines Control Authority of Zimbabwe and the local pharmaceutical industrialists to discuss the US$10 million revolving fund and then to have a permanent oversight of how it is used.
This should mean that all within the pharmaceutical sector will know what is going on, who is doing what, who is adding products and when, and allowing all to see the quality assurance reports of the regulator.
In this particular sector a lot of information needs to be shared so that Zimbabwean patients get the right products at a fair price.
The Government, like many governments around the world with large procurement budgets, wants to use its buying to help support local manufacturers and suppliers.
But at the same time, the Government is determined to get value for the money it spends, so the local industries have to be able to compete on quality and price; they do not get the free ride that tended to wreck many local industries when the economy was opened up.
This time we are getting it right and a whole range of industries are being built or rebuilt on far sounder lines.
