This project focusses on vaccine manufacturing on the African continent as a health and industrial project. In the wake global vaccine inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic, African governments and researchers alongside international actors have spearheaded efforts to significantly develop vaccine manufacturing capacity on the African continent. Such efforts hold promises for health equity and security, research and innovation and industrialisation. Yet, how might we understand current manufacturing efforts on the African continent?

Importantly, various vaccine manufacturing projects are being started and expanded across the continent. These projects are heterogenous with countries having different capacities and histories, ranging from priorities and types of vaccines, who collaboration is with, manufacturing models and technologies, finance mechanisms, types of partnerships and underlaying values. While all of this work is really critical for health and development of the continent, how might we understand, analyse and assess the multiplicity of vaccine manufacturing initiatives?

This project has the following objectives: 

  1. Map current vaccine manufacturing initiatives across the African continent.
  2. Analyse the financial tools and mechanisms and their implications currently being used or proposed to pay for manufacturing efforts.
  3. Examine how historic manufacturing efforts on continent has been used towards industrialisation and health equity.
  4. Discuss legal frameworks which are being used or developed to enable current projects, unpacking what possibilities and constraints these create.
  5. Explore how manufacturing initiatives are prioritising specific vaccines in relation to health needs, economic factors or development needs.

Underwriting these objectives is a desire to understand how unfolding manufacturing efforts matches the potential of these initiatives to respond justly to the needs for communities, countries and the African continent. Moreover, the project seeks to emphasise who carries the burdens, costs and risks of continued exposure to disease, climate change, inadequate infrastructure and financing, and disproportionate care work.

To do this, this project brings together researchers from the University of Cape Town (UCT), University of Oxford, The Centre for the Aids Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA), the Third World Network (TWN) and the People’s Health Movement (PHM). Transnational Institute (TNI) has partnered with us on this project since 2025.

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