Less than 30% of drugs in Nigeria made locally

Last week, the Director General, of Nigeria’s National Agency for Foods, Drugs Administration and Control, NAFDAC, Paul Orhii, said less than 30 percent of essential medicines used in Nigeria was produced domestically, reports the local newspaper Vanguard. Dr Orhii said this when he received a delegation of Sierra Leone food and drugs regulators in Abuja.

He said: "One of the factors that encourage fake and substandard drugs in Nigeria is that we have low manufacturing capacity. What I did when I came in was to encourage our local manufacturers to increase production and also to upgrade facilities to meet international standards and most of them responded."

However, he pointed out that a few of the pharmaceutical companies in the country might obtain World Health Organization pre-qualification before the end of this year.