Mozambique factory

Back in 2003, Brazil s and Mozambique s presidents, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Joaquim Chissano, agreed to set up the first pharmaceutical factory in Mozambique, to be entirely owned by the national government. The project - widely known as the Brazil-Mozambican anti-retro-viral factory because of its commitment to produce AIDS drugs - still represents the single most expensive and eye-catching project of Brazil s South-South cooperation programme in the health sector. 

After a description of the evolution of the cooperation project and of the collaboration between the two countries to set up a factory in Mozambique, this chapter presents details of the technical investment needed to start such a complex enterprise in a country with a less-than-ideal business environment. The crucial link between the factory and the local as well as regional pharmaceutical markets is then analysed. The chapter ends with a discussion of the issues still hampering the development of the factory in Mozambique, and of the insight to be gained from such an experience, including insights for those countries in the subcontinent with a rather more established pharmaceutical industry. 

Official reports show that back in 2003, the initiative to set up a pharmaceutical factory in Mozambique originally had the following stated objectives. It aimed to secure the supply of anti-retroviral medicines (ARVs) for HIV/AIDS treatment in the country, and to jump-start pharmaceutical generics manufacturing in Mozambique, enabling the fulfilment of the objectives of the national primary care and pharmaceutical policies. It also aimed to reduce the country s dependence on pharmaceutical donations and imports and to contribute to the creation of local capacity for pharmaceutical production and industrial management (de Oliveira, 2013). 

Although according to the business plan the factory would require 88 full-time staff to manufacture at full capacity (24 for direct production, 4 for quality-control-related services, and 18 for management and administration), at the time of writing only 55 had been recruited, and a team of 8 Brazilian technical assistants based in Maputo were still providing key management and technical expertise for the factory s operations. Given the limited development of industrial capabilities in Mozambique,... 

In contrast to the experiences described in other chapters, the Maputo factory story provides a case study of an attempt to kick-start, through an innovative South-South partnership, pharmaceutical production in a country that previously had none. Our narrative of development and implementation of the project has shown the key role of the innovative South-South collaboration for the nascent pharmaceutical industry in Mozambique in terms of both financial subsidy and technical support. However, while the technical collaboration with Brazil remains highly positive, the link to health markets in Mozambique seems to have been a major problem, as the health-industry link so fundamental in the Brazilian pharmaceutical development experience seems to have worked less well here, at least for these early years. 

Mozambique s particular industrial environment was recognized as another factor hampering the development of the pharmaceutical factory. In comparison to other African countries with a more established industry, Mozambique seems to be lacking a critical mass of suppliers, products and services needed for the development of a competitive pharmaceutical business. All the primary products needed for Maputo factory s manufacturing are, up to now, imported from Brazil all the basic maintenance and technical services are contracted to South African firms, and resorting to lower cost Indian and Chinese equipment has not been an option, given the limited equipment maintenance services provided by such suppliers in Mozambique. 

Finally, this case study raises questions about the suitability of foreign health policy and production models to the African context. If Brazil s original plan was to help Mozambique to replicate its own domestic experience in the AIDS fight and in pharmaceutical production, the implementation of this factory project exposed Brazil s limited familiarity with the development cooperation conundrum, but also the relevance of the differences between the two contexts (Russo et al., 2014). If some of the holdups in the project could be attributed to the relative lack of experience of Brazilian civil servants borrowed from their domestic duties to implement a cooperation project in the African continent, this case study probably shows that solutions that have proved effective elsewhere are hard to replicate in Mozambique for more than just one reason. 

Licia de Oliveira is Director of the Fiocruz Regional Office for Africa in Maputo, Mozambique. A pharmacist by training, Licia is currently a senior researcher at Farmanguinhos Institute of Pharmaceutical Technology, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has been the project coordinator for the implementation of SMM drugs factory in Mozambique since its inception. 

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