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The European Investment Bank (EIB), the world’s largest multilateral bank, and Afreximbank, the pan-African multilateral financial institution, have joined forces to enhance healthcare and pharmaceutical investment across sub-Saharan Africa and strengthen health resilience on the continent.

The new EUR 200 million health investment initiative was formally launched on 8 March 2023 by EIB Vice President Thomas Östros and Afreximbank Executive Vice President Denys Denya at the 5th United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries taking place in Doha, Qatar.

Afreximbank and the EIB will each provide EUR 100 million new investment to update and expand public healthcare facilities and enhance production of safe, affordable, and effective medicines across sub-Saharan Africa. This is EIB’s first dedicated backing for intermediated health investment in Africa.

The new Africa health financing initiative, part of the European Union Global Gateway initiative, has been designed by health, financial, and technical experts from EIB and Afreximbank to unlock crucial investment to improve access to local healthcare and scale-up production of medicines essential to tackling deadly diseases such as cancer, HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis.

The new EIB-Afreximbank initiative will support new investment in health facilities, including construction and equipment of clinicals and hospitals, essential to enable rapid treatment of communicable diseases, reduce infant mortality, and facilitate accessibility to public healthcare, EIB and Afreximbank said in a joint statement.

The new health resilience investment initiative will also target financing to scale up local production of quality pharmaceuticals in sub-Saharan Africa.

Since the start of the COVID pandemic, the European Investment Bank has provided more than EUR 12 billion for health investment around the world, including support for vaccine development, production and distribution, upgrading hospitals, and improving medical education. In recent years, the EIB has supported health and healthcare investment in Angola, Benin, Ghana, Morocco, and Niger alongside supporting the COVAX Covid vaccine initiative across Africa.

Afreximbank spearheaded Africa’s effective response to the COVID pandemic by financing the Africa Medical Supplies Platform (AMSP) that enabled pooled procurement of PPEs and providing $2 billion to procure and distribute vaccines under the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust (AVAT) programme.