There’s significant opportunity for suppliers of good quality pharmaceutical products, at a good price in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), according to the chief executive officer and cardiology specialist at the Karavia Hospital, Dr Monga Kapema. He was speaking during a site visit conducted by a South African business delegation that was in the DRC last week. The delegation visited the hospital as part of the second leg of an Investment and Trade Initiative (ITI) last week.
Kapema said there were no manufacturers of pharmaceutical products in the DRC and therefore the hospital depended entirely on imported medication. According to him, the biggest challenges were those of low quality of medicines being imported into the country, as well as people resorting to purchasing medication in the informal market due to the prohibitively expensive prices of high quality medicines that were manufactured abroad.
The export manager of Akacia Medical, a South African medical and pharmaceutical company based in Cape Town, Ilian Minkov, suggested that a solution that could assist the hospital would be a partnership with a South African company that could assist in the building of a warehouse in the DRC. He said the joint venture would then be able to import medicines in bulk, pre-package and label them in the local language, and store in a warehouse from which they could be distributed.
According to Minkov, that process could be partial local manufacturing of the products with a view to establishing a fully fledged company in the future. He added that this approach could be further extended to other products such as needles, gloves and syringes.
