Statement at the World Local Production Forum 2025
26/6/2025
- Video
From 7 to 9 April 2025, Julia Hochberger, global health expert at Wemos, participated in the World Local Production Forum (WLPF). At this conference, organized by the World Health Organization, relevant stakeholders discuss the opportunities to enhance global access to medicines through local production. In a session on government policies and commitments, Julia gave a statement on what is needed to ensure that regional production leads to countries’ self-reliance in access to medical products.
Watch Julia’s 2-minute statement here. Below the video is the transcript of the statement.
“Good afternoon, thank you chair and organizers for this opportunity.
I want to start with a message of hope, which is that regional production offers a great and highly-needed prospect: equitable, affordable and independent access to life-saving medical products for all, based on local health needs.
]This was, is and should remain the focus of strengthening regional production worldwide.
Meaningful access requires more than just increasing the production on the continent.
For pharmaceutical manufacturing to truly serve local populations, it must not only be done in the region, but it must also be done for and by the region.
So it is essential to build a sustainable, equitable ecosystem. And for that we need three key shifts.
First, public investments must serve public health, not private profits. There is a role for governments and global funders to attach clear conditions to financing to ensure that manufacturing efforts contribute to health equity, sovereignty, and self-reliance of the production regions. This means prioritizing regional health needs over market forces and reinforcing local capacity rather than multinational powers and entities.
Secondly, we want to touch on the topic of technology transfer, which must be completed in an effective and transparent manner. Wemos has evaluated the BioNTech facility in Rwanda, and whilst many positives came out of this initiative, we see that there are risks attached when knowledge and decision-making remain in foreign hands. And so there is a continued dependency in this situation, but self-reliance requires ownership of the full manufacturing cycle.
And thirdly, governments must shape an enabling ecosystem for local producers. This includes investing in early-stage R&D, harmonizing regulatory frameworks and creating regulatory frameworks in the first place. But also to create infrastructure development and as we have heard often today skills and workforce development. All of this will build and independent capacity across the entire pharmaceutical value chain.
My statement today is that: business as usual will not suffice.
Governments must take decisive actions to ensure that investments in regional production align with local health needs. Only then we can achieve our core objective of regional production: which is equitable, affordable and independent access to health products for all.”
