Rumbidzayi Zinyuke
Senior Health Reporter
ZIMBABWE’S drive to strengthen medicines availability under National Development Strategy 2 (NDS2) is set to gather pace, with the National Pharmaceutical Company expected to take on an expanded role in boosting local production and ensuring consistent supply across public health institutions.
NatPharm managing director, Mr Newman Madzikwa, said the central focus placed on medicines availability under NDS2 presented both a challenge and an opportunity for the organisation to elevate its performance and meet national expectations.
“It actually gives us a challenge to be able to up our game, to make sure that we meet the ambitious and yet realistic expectation that the NDS2 places on us.
“By inference, it’s actually the members of the public of Zimbabwe who are putting a mandate on us to ensure that we meet the demands on the ground and help the nation achieve the goals set for 2030,” he said.
He said NatPharm was entering NDS2 on a strong foundation, having already established key international partnerships during the NDS1 period.
These, he said, would support efforts to bring in technology transfer and build local pharmaceutical capacity.
“Under NDS1, we managed to reach out to friendly countries to establish relationships that we will be harnessing in the next strategy in order to bring the much-needed technology transfer from those developed countries to our settings,” he said.
With NDS2 now underway, NatPharm will shift from focusing mainly on distribution to taking a more active role in medicines manufacturing as part of the broader national industrialisation agenda.
“We will be building on the foundation set in NDS1, where we will see ourselves contributing to the bigger manufacturing sector in Zimbabwe as a player, as NatPharm, and doing it on behalf of Government,” he said.
He said the organisation’s strategy had two core components: strengthening the existing local pharmaceutical industry and venturing into manufacturing areas where local companies are not yet producing certain critical medicines.
“There are two angles that we are taking as we go forward. We are going to be supporting the local industry, the local manufacturers that are there, and we are increasing our share from them to a significant amount.
“We are also going to be a player, manufacturing products that are not already being manufactured locally, in order to complement them rather than compete with them,” Mr Madzikwa said.
He said the national target of producing 30 percent of essential medicines locally by 2030 is achievable, noting that other countries have successfully expanded their manufacturing capacity within short periods.
“It’s actually very attainable, this 30 percent by 2030. We have visited some countries who, in less than 10 years, moved from 10 percent to almost 80 percent local production.
“For instance, Algeria, we were there recently and we learned that they deliberately put policies, like the ones that our NDS2 is promoting, that saw them grow from around 28 percent to 80 percent in the past decade,” added Mr Madzikwa.
He said Natpharm was committed to ensuring that public hospitals and clinics were adequately stocked and that Zimbabwe built a resilient, self-sustaining pharmaceutical supply chain in line with national development goals.
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