“Africa will not be able to recover until all Africans are vaccinated,” President Cyril Ramaphosa has told participants at a G20 Compact with Africa meeting.
The Compact with Africa is a G20 initiative that promotes macroeconomic, business and financing reforms to attract more private investment in Africa, including in infrastructure.
Vaccine inequity was a recurring theme, and heads of state shared reforms that they had undertaken as part of the initiative. Closer international cooperation was urged to address climate change, debt levels and investment shortfalls.
President Emmanuel Macron said France had committed to providing $10 million vaccine doses for Africa.
African Development Bank President Akinwumi Adesina said the African Development Bank had committed to investing $3 billion in building Africa’s pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity, including manufacturing of vaccines, while World Bank President David Malpass highlighted vaccine financing programmes set up in 54 countries, noting that more than half of these were in Africa.
There was consensus among all African leaders on the need for vaccine self-sufficiency as a longer-term solution, with President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana pointing out that there should have been lessons learned from Ebola.
The conference brought together heads of state of the 12 Compact members and institutional partners, including the African Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
It involved strategy discussions around attracting higher more foreign direct investment into Africa and the urgent imperative to develop vaccine manufacture capability on the African continent. Securing the continent’s recovery from the impacts of Covid-19 is one of the Compact’s near-term objectives.
