The African Regulatory Leadership Programme

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the political leadership of the African Union undertook to invest in local manufacturing capacity for vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics, through the Partnership for African Vaccines Manufacturing Framework. The framework aims to locally produce 60% of vaccines needed on the continent by the year 2040, building on a sound regulatory environment established through the African Medicines Regulatory Harmonization Initiative and the African Medicines Agency. A competent Chief Executive Officer and the Executive Management Team of a national regulatory authority (NRA) are the driving force for accelerating organizational development towards stable, well-functioning and integrated national regulatory systems for medical products as recommended by the World Health Organization Benchmarking Tool. The African Regulatory Leadership Project-a recommendation of the Future of Health and Economic Resilience of Africa (FHERA) initiative-will be jointly led by Wits RHI, the largest research institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The project goal is to increase the African NRAs senior executives' leadership capacity to provide oversight on the medical products' regulatory ecosystem. Two Cohorts of thirteen CEOs each will be piloted through a 4-days face-to-face interaction followed by a 6-months mentorship programme.