AfDB Harps On Partnership For Sustainable Development In Africa

Posted by Eric Ojo African News, Business News, Latest Headlines Saturday, February 18th, 2023

(AFRICAN EXAMINER) – African Development Bank (AfDB) Group has reiterated the importance of partnerships in driving sustainable development in Africa.

AfDB Vice President of Infrastructure, Private Sector and Industrialization, Solomon Quaynor made the observation while speaking at the signing ceremony of a joint partnership action plan by the AfDB Group and the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), on Thursday in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The partnership agreement which was signed by the two institutions is aimed at the development of the development of the pharmaceutical industry sector within their African member countries.

Quaynor said the AfDB places considerable importance on partnerships in its contributions to sustainable development in the continent.

“Through partnership we can go further, we can increase development effectiveness, we can leverage our complementarities and harness our synergies”, he said.

The plan offers a new framework for strengthened cooperation and mutual development priorities, with a strong emphasis on boosting the continent’s health defense systems.

The aide-memoire was signed on behalf of both institutions by Director of Industrial and Trade Development at the AfDB, Dr. Abdu Mukhtar and the Director of the Economic and Social Infrastructure Department of IsDB, Idrissa Dia.

Mukhtar noted that the AfDB’ Pharmaceutical Action Plan is well aligned with IsDB’s strategy in the pharma sector. “We will work collaboratively and with other partners to achieve results in this sector, which is critical to Africa’s development”, he added.

Following the signing, Dia, stressed the need to increase cooperation across all human development sectors and initiatives, given the strong strategic and operational alignment between the IsDB and the AfDB across the health, pharmaceutical, education, water and sanitation sectors.

The signing rounded out two days of presentations and deliberations on the institutions’ health strategies for Africa and the AfDB’s Pharmaceutical Action Plan. During the sessions, teams from both institutions discussed a joint pipeline of pharmaceutical projects proposed for co-financing, as well as potential collaboration in advocacy and knowledge creation for their member countries.

The Joint Action Plan enables both institutions to grow a shared pipeline of bankable projects around key complementary themes to which each institution would bring their comparative advantage. The plan covers lending to public and private sector projects and pharmaceutical development projects using a regional approach.

The institutions will also cooperate on the organization of a global Pharmaceutical Business Forum in May 2023 at the General Annual Meetings of the AfDB. The event will bring together key pharmaceutical sector industry captains, including big pharma companies, continental, regional and governmental regulatory agencies, technology transfer entities.

The gathering will deliberate on business opportunities, vaccine off-take agreements, pharmaceutical technology transfer agreements and project preparation resources, among other topics.

IsDB Director General, Country Programmes, Anasse Aissami encouraged the participants to expedite implementation of the respective pharmaceutical programmes with focus on increasing local production and regulatory support.

Similarly, the Acting Director General, Global Practices and Partnerships, Amer Bukvic said: “We will solidly establish and operationalize the health and pharmaceutical collaboration, and we will work hard to enhance the technical cooperation”.

In 2017, heads of the two institutions signed a co-financing Memorandum of Understanding to scale up co-financing activities over the period 2018-2020. A sum of $2 billion was earmarked for co-financing, equally split between the two institutions.

The MoU was extended to December 2023 in order to intensify co-financing across strategic sectors such as infrastructure development; human development; private sector development and investment promotion.

In his remarks, the Director, Financial Mobilization and Partnerships for the AfDB, Desire Vencatachellum said: “There is room to extend our partnership under the umbrella of the existing MoU to our priority sectors”.

The Human Development Manager at IsDB, Dr. Ammar Abdo observed that the IsDB-AfDB health industrialization initiative is “a deep dive exercise between the two sisters’ institutions on strategic and operational health matters”.