Making medicines in post-colonial Ghana: State policies, technology transfer and pharmaceuticals market

The COVID-19 epidemic has highlighted the risks of shortages resulting from dependence on medicine imports. Today's situation where a few companies in the Global North control COVID-19 vaccine production is having dire consequences on African countries' access. However, the challenges surrounding local production of medical products in Africa are long-standing issues dating back to independence. Using Ghana as a case study, this paper looks primarily at how the dependence on medicine imports can be understood as the result of policies implemented since independence, as well as the changes that the Ghanaian State has undergone in reaction to international events and the evolution of the structure of global pharmaceutical capital. It examines the policies associated with the Ghanaian State's project to promote local pharmaceutical production, from independence to the present, and the role that non-state actors such as pharmaceutical companies have played. Based on an historical political economy approach, it highlights how the roles of the State and its forms of intervention have evolved over time, from planning (right after independence), to implementing (during the global crisis of the 1970s–1980s), and finally to regulating (from the 1990–2000s onward). This paper draws on 14 months of PhD research fieldwork (2014–2018). It consists of interviews (n = 50) with Ghanaian actors in the pharmaceutical sector, observations in a pharmaceutical plant in Accra, and research into archives at the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD) of the Ministry of Industry.