Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what steps she is taking to end Africa's dependence on imported covid-19 vaccines.

Building large scale vaccine manufacturing capacity in Africa will require a coordinated, long term approach to enable factories to be built, skills to be developed, regulatory frameworks to be put in place, licenses to be issued and demand to be managed effectively. The UK Government is working closely with the African Union and other international partners to achieve this. We are supporting the new African led "Partnership for African Vaccine Manufacturing" (PAVM) initiative to achieve its ambition of ensuring that by 2040 60% of vaccines consumed in Africa are produced there. We are doing so, for example, by helping design the overall strategy of PAVM, by ensuring key international organisations such as "Gavi, the vaccine alliance" support PAVM's objectives, by supporting African based vaccines producers to develop their business case and attract investment, and identifying where UK regulatory expertise could put appropriate frameworks in place. We are also working with the UK private sector and UK academic networks to help maximise their contribution. The results are already being felt, with announcements of up to 1 billion doses of Covid vaccines produced in Africa by the end of 2022.