In addressing the issue of vaccine equity, for Africa, Kigali Special Economic Zone has witnessed the breaking of the ground by Rwandan President Paul Kagame for the construction of the German vaccine manufacturer’s BioNTech plant for the production of what is regarded as Africa’s first of three planned projects to produce treatments against COVID-19 and other diseases by early 2024.
Just before the groundbreaking, several of Africa’s Heads of State and governments from Commonwealth countries signed and adopted what is known as the Kigali Declaration on NTDs, during the Kigali Summit on Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) in that country to reaffirm their commitment to ending malaria by 2030.
The relatively new technology which uses messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) would see the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech initially producing an estimated 50 million vaccine doses in its 30,000-square-meter (323,000-square-foot) plant in Kigali.
In his words, the Rwandan President described the occasion as a historic milestone towards vaccine equity and promised that his government intends to build on it to woo other investors by putting in place conditions that would attract other manufacturers and innovators.
Quoting the official Twitter account of the Office of the President of Rwanda, President Kagame stated that Rwanda fully supports BioNTech’s commitment to power this factory entirely with green energy, and we will work together closely to achieve that. The land we are standing on is dedicated to biopharma manufacturing.
In his tweet, he emphasized that the ceremony of the breaking of ground for the building of the BioNTech plant is the aftermath of the African Union’s decision last year to take action on vaccine inequality and that similar sites are also planned to be located in Senegal and South Africa.
The German BioNTech, a biopharmaceutical company that got the approval to co-develop the first approved mRNA-based vaccine with Pfizer stated that it would work to rapidly advance the training of the approximately 100 employees, who will take over the production and all associated laboratory and quality assurance tasks on site.
In a news material on its website, https://www.biontech.com/ the company stated that its first batch of containers for production, so-called “BioNTainers”, are expected to be delivered to the site at the end of 2022 and that it aims to become a hub in a decentralized and robust end-to-end African manufacturing network for the manufacture of all vaccines.
Participants included Paul Kagame, President of the Republic of Rwanda, Nana Akufo-Addo, President of the Republic of Ghana, Moussa Faki Mahamat, Chair of the African Union Commission, Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (via video link), Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission (via video link), Aïssata Tall Sall, Senegalese Foreign Minister, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (“WHO”), Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director General of the World Trade Organization (“WTO”), Nardos Bekele-Thomas, CEO of the African Union Development Agency-NEPAD, Wamkele Mene, Secretary-General of the African Continental Free Trade Area, and Prof. Dr. Ugur Sahin, co-founder, and CEO of BioNTech.
BioNTech has also hinted that its First-in-Human Clinical Trial of its malaria vaccine candidate is billed to start in 2022
