ACCRA — The COVID-19 pandemic exposed with clinical precision the fragility of global supply chains that had been optimized for efficiency over resilience, with African countries among those most severely affected by disruptions to imported goods ranging from personal protective equipment and pharmaceuticals to consumer goods and agricultural inputs. The experience accelerated a strategic rethinking already underway in several African economies about the appropriate degree of domestic production capacity for goods previously imported with confidence in global supply reliability — and has given new momentum to supply chain localization arguments that had historically struggled to compete with the economic logic of comparative advantage in policy debates.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing was the sector where supply chain vulnerability showed most dramatically during the pandemic, as African health systems found themselves competing unsuccessfully for global supplies of PPE, ventilators, diagnostics and eventually vaccines in a market where wealthy-country governments had prioritized their own populations through advance purchase agreements that African countries could not afford to match. The African Union’s goal of producing sixty percent of African vaccine needs domestically by 2040, supported by investment commitments from CEPI and bilateral development partners, reflects a strategic assessment that pharmaceutical manufacturing self-sufficiency is a public health imperative that justifies industrial policy support even at some cost to economic efficiency.
Food security concerns have similarly driven arguments for greater localization of agricultural input supply — fertilizers, seeds and pesticides — whose global supply chains experienced disruption during the pandemic and more severely during the Russia-Ukraine war, as Russia and Belarus are major fertilizer exporters whose supply disruptions created acute input availability crises for African smallholder farmers in the 2022 growing season. The disruption accelerated investment in domestic fertilizer production in Nigeria, where the Dangote fertilizer plant has progressively ramped urea production from domestic natural gas, reducing dependence on imported fertilizer in Africa’s largest agricultural economy.
Consumer goods manufacturing localization has gained ground in several West African markets, where a combination of import substitution industrial policy, currency depreciation that makes imports more expensive in local currency terms, and growing domestic market scale has improved the economics of domestic production relative to import for a broader range of consumer product categories. Nigerian manufacturing in food and beverage, personal care products, packaging and construction materials has grown against a backdrop of import restriction policies and currency depreciation that have shifted the comparative cost calculation in favor of local production, though unreliable power supply and high logistics costs have limited the extent to which cost improvement has translated into genuine competitive advantage.
Regional supply chain development within African trading blocs has been an aspiration of AfCFTA and regional economic community frameworks, seeking to build intra-African supply chains that reduce the continent’s dependence on intercontinental trade for intermediate goods and component supply. The practical barriers to regional supply chain development are real: manufacturing capabilities for intermediate goods are concentrated in a small number of African countries, regulatory and standards harmonization that allows component movement across borders without re-inspection is incomplete, and payment infrastructure for predictable intra-African commercial transactions remains more costly and less reliable than comparable developed market equivalents.
The honest assessment of African supply chain localization progress is that the pandemic created genuine urgency and strategic rethinking that has translated into some real investment, particularly in pharmaceutical and agricultural input manufacturing, alongside continuing structural barriers — infrastructure cost, skills gaps, small individual market scale relative to minimum efficient manufacturing scale, and limited regional integration in intermediate goods trade — that prevent rapid and comprehensive supply chain restructuring away from global sources. The direction of policy intent has shifted meaningfully toward resilience-oriented thinking; the translation of that intent into industrial capacity change is necessarily slower, more expensive and more dependent on sustained policy commitment than emergency rhetoric sometimes acknowledges.
