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The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the largest trade agreement after the World Trade Organisation (WTO) begins in January with promises of borderless intra-continental opportunities but Nigeria’s healthcare industry appears ill-positioned to take advantage.
People with deep knowledge of the industry have continued to ask whether Nigeria is well-positioned to offer investors a fair return on their investments as the trade treaty promises.
AfCFTA has been touted to open up a $3.4 trillion opportunity for a continent barely trading at 16 percent with each other. Nigeria’s healthcare sector and its industry investors are expected to benefit as it offers the opportunity for businesses to expand across the region, industry experts said.
For Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, it is an opportunity for healthcare to grow and the implementation of the agreement is expected to impact human capital investments, health innovations, health security, universal health coverage and the pharmaceutical industry in a country like Nigeria.
“Nigeria health sector is not ready for the AfCFTA. The fundamental issues are the competition index and regulation. Healthcare is a social good and requires good balance so we do not turn it into capitalisation,” Debo Odulana, co-founder and chief executive officer, Doctoora said.
Weak regulation and unchecked compliance in the sector will begin to show up when AfCFTA makes competition on the continent borderless.
According to Odulana, the public sector is a big part of the challenge and it may be difficult to check the level of preparedness. Nigeria’s healthcare performance is not really good in terms of preparedness, how then can we emerge with other countries.
Speaking to experts on the benefit to the health space, Sand Mba-Kalu, executive director of Africa International Trade and Commerce Research was of the opinion that Africa’s free trade agreement is expected to open Nigeria’s pharmaceutical industry to external competition, as compiled from an industry survey.
“The industry will attract foreign investment from more advanced pharmaceutical industry players from Africa and it will be exposed to the external regulator with Pan-African view,” Mba-Kalu said.
According to him adopting a systematic approach will help secure adequate funding for the industry and develop the healthcare infrastructure. “It will encourage partnership with the raw material source from Africa for the Nigerian pharmaceutical industry.”
In the same vein, Abiodun Awosusi, a health economist at Lagos-based Health Systems and Development Enterprise said the agreement is likely to impact Nigeria’s health sector in at least five areas: “human capital investments, health innovations, trade for social impact, health security, and universal health coverage.”
“AfCFTA is likely to have a major impact on health system strengthening and universal health coverage with varying results across countries in Africa while sustainable financing is central to Universal health coverage (UHC) progress; significant funding gaps persist across the continent.”
“UHC is one of the SDG 3 targets, which offers countries the right framework to increase access to high-quality health services for every citizen without financial hardship,” he said.
Awosusi added that sustained global support for UHC culminated in the recent adoption of a high-level United Nations declaration calling for concerted efforts to accelerate progress across countries to achieve the target by 2030.
Meanwhile, looking at Africa’s health security with the current coronavirus outbreak which has affected some African countries like Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, and more recently Senegal, the movement of people and goods across borders will require an emphasis on health security, industry experts have advised.
The on-going coronavirus epidemic affirms the value of investing in health system strengthening and cultural intelligence to prevent and/or effectively manage epidemics, experts in Nigeria’s health sector said.
“While there are no better tools and multi-stakeholder collaboration platforms to manage, there is a need to pay more attention to health security as AfCFTA implementation progress gains significant momentum,” an industry player who asked not to be quoted said.
Awosusi was of the opinion that there is an urgent need to invest more resources in pandemic preparedness particularly in regional institutions like the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with vital support from multilateral and bilateral development organizations including the World Health Organization and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Each country also needs a strong public health institute to predict, prevent and manage the spread of communicable diseases within and across borders, without neglecting the growing burden of non-communicable diseases,” he said.
