How IFC is Powering Rwanda’s Biotech Growth

This is a podcast of the International Finance Corporation. 

Aida Holly-Nambi: Let me take you back to the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Maybe you’re avidly watching maps of counters telling us how many cases each country is reporting. More and more cases are cropping up everywhere. Borders are closing, offices are closing. More cases, more deaths. It’s a tense time, filled with despair. But all of a sudden, as the year comes to a close, there's talk of a vaccine, of vaccines. And it feels like hope like things could be different. But maybe that difference will only be if you live in a certain part of the world. The North or the West. Maybe things will be different if you don’t happen to live in Africa. 

• “As the richest nations buy out the lionshares of doses, how and when will developing countries be able to vaccinate their populations…” 

• “We just heard hours ago that India has placed a temporary hold on exports of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, one of the vaccines developed with the UK and produced here in India.” 

• “As the U.S and other Western countries discuss the rollout of COVID vaccine boosters, in Africa and other parts of the world, many millions are still waiting for their very first shot.” 

Aida: If you were in Africa, you might have been asking yourself, what do we have to do to get our hands on these potentially life-saving solutions? On these vaccines?  

Yvan Butera: I'm Yvan Butera Minister of State for Health here in Rwanda. I’m the Minister of State for Health here in Rwanda. So when COVID hit, I was part of the national task force that was coordinating the COVID activities. Because you don't produce vaccines yourself, you have limited control on how we can access these vaccines. It's not only a problem in Rwanda, but many African countries, as you know, we produce less than 1% of the vaccines that we need on the continent. 

Aida: Rwanda, like many African countries, relied on a combination of strategies and partnerships to access vaccines. But so long as vaccines are imported, getting them in a timely manner, at an affordable cost, and quantity that you need is not guaranteed. So there were some big learnings from the pandemic. The major one being, Rwanda and Africa need to make vaccines on the continent. Because only 1% of all vaccines, that’s everything from yellow fever to chicken pox to polio, are currently made on the African continent. And that leaves the continent vulnerable.  

Aida: But it also leaves the rest of the world vulnerable, because as we saw with COVID, deadly viruses and diseases don’t really respect national boundaries. They can jump from country to country, continent to continent, despite our best efforts. And not all countries have the equal ability to respond. 

Yvan: There's still inequalities in terms of access, where you have a concentration of production in a certain part of the world, but you have other parts of the world that have not yet reached that capacity. So I think what needs to be done, is to build the capacities globally to produce these preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic tools, because diseases don't know any borders, therefore production of tools to fight these diseases shouldn't know any borders as well.

Aida: I’m Aida Holly-Nambi. And I’ve come to Kigali to see how Rwanda, in partnership with the International Finance Corporation, IFC, is taking up the challenge of building a homegrown pharmaceutical industry.  But vaccine production cannot happen outside of a whole ecosystem supporting this development. So, how do you build a state of the art medical ecosystem? Where do you even begin? 

Malick Antoine: So my name is Malick Antoine, I'm a principal investment officer at IFC. I've been involved in the Rwanda project since its inception a little over four years ago, when we began thinking with the government of Rwanda about ways of localizing, initially, vaccines and later, overall pharmaceutical production in the country.

Aida: So Malick, what are the ingredients for a successful pharmaceutical industry?  

Malick: The ingredients for building a vibrant pharmaceutical ecosystem include infrastructure, regulation, education,  innovation. 

Aida: There’s the making of the actual medicines, but then there’s a whole world around this that needs to be thriving too, in order to have a viable pharmaceutical industry. So let’s dive into just what exactly these other elements are: Infrastructure. Regulation. Education. Innovation. Each of these components are equally important to a thriving ecosystem, and they are what I’ve come to Kigali to learn about, so let’s get into it. 

We’re going to begin with infrastructure. 

Ralf Elben: So my name is Ralf Elben . I'm a biomedical engineer by profession with a background in the pharmaceutical production industry. And I work for GIZ. 

Aida: Ralf is working to support the establishment of the biotechnological sector in Rwanda. I met with him to speak about the Rwanda Life Sciences Park - an upcoming initiative to host a number of companies related to the medical industry in one space. It’s an important element in Rwanda’s quest for a homegrown pharmaceutical industry and as far as infrastructure goes pharma parks are vital to the ecosystem.  

Ralf: When I worked in the private sector, I worked in pharma parks in the past, and when I came here, the first question I asked myself is where's the pharma Park? As you will rarely find pharmaceutical companies standing alone on a green field. They're always in parks, and that is because the infrastructure that you need, like the support services are rather expensive, so it's not worthwhile to establish all these support services for a company on its own. So that's why they group up and then they share the resources.

Aida: Manufacturing vaccines and medication to a high standard requires a lot of high-cost auxiliary services like: water purification, decontamination, laundry and transportation, but all these costs can be shared amongst companies if they are working close together. So a park offers huge savings for companies who share costs and benefit from economies of scale. They can also benefit from the power of proximity, which is something I also heard from Minister Butera. 

Yvan: To have people working together, collaboration, where you have industry, but you also have research and development institutions that work in the same geographical space, they can exchange ideas, work on the same projects, find collaboration that will spur innovation so that infrastructure, that ecosystem, is extremely important.  So that's what the life science park will come and address. 

Yvan: So for us, what we did right on is to establish the right partnerships to be able to enable local manufacturing, and ultimately landed a good partnership with bioNtech that has set up the first end to end mRNA facility on the continent.

Aida: BioNTech is a German vaccine production company who have entered a collaboration with the Rwandan government to produce vaccines right here in Kigali. Their equipment and training will put Rwanda on a path to upscale its vaccine production and pharmaceutical production on the whole. But – More production needs more oversight. And so that brings us to the second aspect of pharma ecosystem development. Regulation. 

Aida: So I went to the headquarters of the Rwanda Food and Drug Authority to meet their deputy director general, Martine Umuhoza.  

Aida: From all your years of working in the pharmaceutical industry, what have you seen as some of the regulatory problems that people who want to make drugs and medicines face when they're trying to operate? 

Martine Umuhoza: There is the major issue of regulatory fragmentation across the continent, across Africa, because there is different regulations from country to country, which can complicate compliance, and, of course, increase cost.

Aida: So let’s just say I’ve got a medicine I'd like to put on the market in one African country, at the moment, I can be bogged down in bureaucracy trying to meet the slightly differing standards in different African countries. It can take months, years even to meet requirements to have my medicine on the market in one country. In an ideal world, there would be some kind of harmony across different countries in similar markets. In fact for a pharma industry to thrive it needs to have access to those markets. This is something that the African Union has recognized, which is one of the reasons it set up the African Medicine Agency.  

Martine: There is a major issue of regulatory fragmentation across the continent, Luckily, there is, the African Medicine Agency, and Rwanda was chosen to host it, and this will harmonize regulation across Africa and improve access to quality medicine.

Aida: Rwanda is working to bring its neighbors together and make the process easier for companies trying to get their drug on those markets. But that’s not all. The World Health Organization guides, governs and even ranks different countries' regulatory bodies based on a number of criteria, which basically gives a guideline of what they have to do in order to become a world-renowned Food and Drug Authority. That’s something the Rwanda FDA is working on. They’ve just been awarded Maturity Level 3, the second highest standard an FDA can achieve and working towards level 4.   

Martine: We are currently working on internal processes to ensure transparency and efficiency, to comply with WHO guidelines. The major one was on capacity building. We had to recruit more staff and we are investing a lot in staff training and enhancing our laboratory facilities to meet international standards. And also, we are working with WHO and other regulatory bodies to ensure that our practices are in line with global based standards. And in our current structure, also, we have a team dedicated to industrial support, that team will be assisting pharmaceutical investors, and will create a favorable environment for growth while ensuring regulatory compliance.

Aida: Rwanda FDA also works with both local and international firms, from the development of the drug- through clinical trials- all the way to approvals. They are very much a part of the process of bringing new drugs into the Rwandan market but they are also forward looking and nurturing the next generation. 

Martine: We collaborate with the National University of Rwanda to train scientists in biotechnology, and they use even our new quality control lab to enhance their skills and get familiar with the work that we do, because those are the future scientists that will be discovering many things. 

Aida: A pharma industry requires a large number of highly educated people with highly technical skills, and Rwanda will need them fast. To do that, there are a number of different programs investing in… education. 

Felix Seifart: My name is Felix Seifart. I am a higher education and digital learning consultant. Currently, I'm seconded to the Ministry of Education to advise Minister of State, Claudette Irere, and I'm supporting specifically the launch of syllabi, an online training institution for the pharmaceutical, biomanufacturing and related sectors. Syllabi is a measure by the government of Rwanda to support the growing pharmaceutical bio manufacturing sector in the country and in the region, really, with suitable training programs and short courses, micro credential certifications that will allow and offer high skills, high tech training.

Aida: The idea behind Syllabi is that it is demand-driven. So based on the needs of the industry at that moment, courses are developed and training is offered that meets those requirements. It’s flexible, adaptable and can happen online, and this means it can respond to the needs of the labor market very quickly.  

Aida: While Syllabi offers online courses, over at the National University of Rwanda, a new open access lab has been set up to help students learn with a more hands on approach.  

Do you have google maps? Do you have google maps? Please, can you put in UvuBio? I believe it’s connected to the University of Rwanda. 

The lab is run by Uvu Bio, a South African company who have just set up an office in Kigali. I spoke with their CEO Dheepak Maharaj. 

Dheepak Maharaj: We've established that what a university delivers from a graduate and what industry wants is not always aligned. There's always a gap, and we focus our intention, our attention in that gap, so we provide our candidates with hands on exposure to laboratory equipment, which they don't get at the university. 

Aida: On the day that I visited the Uvu Bio lab I was met by lab manager Wycleff Kagisha, the lab was so new they were still unpacking some of the equipment that the students would be learning with. 

Wycleff Kagisha: We are receiving different laboratory items. This still in the crate, we have to open that. There we will have bioreactors. Bioreactors are also used for the growth, the growth of cells. For example, those bioreactors are mainly used for, for example, for vaccine production. 

Wycleff: We have some students here, so we received the first cohort of different students so now this cohort we have 20 students from different areas of the country.

Student One:  I'm graduating this year.

Aida: (on tape) And what do you want to become? 

Student Two: I still have a couple of choices. I haven't decided yet, but I think biotechnology is the way. Anything related to biotechnology I’ll join.

Aida: Are you also a former student? 

Student Three: I'm a fresh graduate. I'm graduating this year, waiting for the graduation. 

Aida: Congratulations. 

Student Three: Thank you.

Aida: And do you want to go into biotech as well? 

Student Three:  Uh yea, yea. Actually, I came here just to learn more about microbiology, even biotech.

Aida: Best of luck. 

Student Three: Thank you.

Wycleff:  So we continue? 

Aida: Here’s UVU Bio’s CEO Dheepak again. 

Dheepak: So as emerging businesses come and they have a need for somebody that can operate a bioreactor. Our candidates are going to be the first choice. In addition to that, we've got, GC, gas chromatography, mass mass spec, which is an analytical equipment, which is critical for the entire pharma sector and other sectors, right? So we would train candidates on how to operate this equipment, how to do the analysis and how to interpret the analysis, and they now become an asset to an organization that runs any analytical process, whether it's in the vaccine or in the pharma process. 

Aida: Uvu Bio’s work, like Syllabi's, is at the nexus of education and innovation. 

More and more companies in the biotech world, or pharma related, are choosing to set up shop in Kigali. 

Dheepak: There's a number of key things that actually put Kigali on our radar, as a destination for growth, and one of it is the progressive nature of the Rwandan government, and how they approach the growth of a new business sector. And we looked at the vision 2050, strategy, and this was a key area, in addition to the PAVM from the Africa CDC. So the PAVM is a partnership for vaccine manufacturing strategy, and that strategy gives Africa a target to produce 60% of its own vaccines by the year 2040, we currently as a continent only produce less than 1%.

Dheepak: So, with that, there's already a strategy in place for more vaccine production, for example, to happen on the continent. And the incentives that the Rwandan government gives and creates to foreign companies to actually locate there means that this growth is going to continue.

Aida: By growing the ecosystem of a pharmaceutical industry, Rwanda is building a world that is bringing jobs, talent, innovation and solutions to the region, and changing the healthcare game for the future. Here’s IFC’s Malick Antoine. 

Malick: The overall business environment, business friendly environment that Rwanda brings means that there’s a certain level of comfort that could be proposed to investors that are looking to not only have access to their market but the overall East and South African markets as well. We are committed to financing bankable projects that locate in the country itself. So we are very excited at the opportunity that's been granted to us, and we look forward to diligence projects alongside potential clients looking to develop pharmaceutical manufacturing in the country.

Aida: Thank you so much for listening, I’m Aida Holly-Nambi. To find out more about IFC’s work across the globe, visit www.ifc.org.