Brazil supports Mozambique’s efforts to double medicine production by 2019

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Brazil supports Mozambique’s efforts to double medicine production by 2019

1:14 CAT | 26 Oct 2018

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A partnership established between Mozambique and Brazil will allow the Mozambican Medicines Society (SMM) to double the production of medicines from 2019 onwards, the Brazilian government announced in a statement on Thursday.

Currently, the medicine factory produces five different types of drugs to help treat diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, mental illness and inflammation.

According to the director of SMM, Evaristo Madime, five other medicines could also be manufactured if the governments of both countries reach agreement on expanding the portfolio of the Mozambican Society of Medicines.

“The first focus is the production of medicines for the National Health Service, that is, hospital medicines. However, little by little, we are bringing in medicines for the private sector – for pharmacies and distribution by private health clinics,” he says.

The agreement between the two countries has brought Brazil’s experience of its Unified Health System and the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation to Mozambique, the statement says.

“Technically, no one here knew how to produce medicines, but today we can proudly say that we have Mozambican technicians who know how to produce medicines, and how to manage the whole process. We have done over 30,000 hours of staff training over the years,” the SMM’s Evaristo Madime says.

This is the Brazilian government’s longest-lasting cooperation project in Africa, and the most expensive, with an estimated cost of 40 million reais (about EUR 945,000), according to the G1 news site.

Former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was an enthusiast of the project, a partnership emblematic of his new foreign policy aimed at increasing South-South relations between Brazil and Africa.

Beginning in 2003, cooperation between Brazil and Mozambique was motivated by the high rate of HIV/Aids in the Mozambican population, but the initiative underwent a radical transformation. Instead of medicines for Aids, the factory invested in producing paracetamol, an analgesic used for headaches and cramps.

The most recent agreement between the Mozambican Medicines Society and the Brazilian government concerned the supply of 150 million paracetamol tablets.

Source: Lusa