Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Decline in Tanzania: How Possible Is a Turnaround to Growth?

As Chapter 1 described, Tanzania has a decades-long history of pharmaceutical production, the sector mirroring fluctuations in Tanzania’s post-independence industrial history. By 2004–05, the sector was estimated to be producing pharmaceuticals worth US$32.5 million, supplying around 30% of the local market and exporting about 10% of local production (MoHSW, 2006). The subsequent rise and decline of the sector is analysed in this chapter, locating firms’ sources of both market resilience and vulnerability in local patterns of ownership, finance and management, interacting with the internationalization of firms’ domestic and regional markets. Finally, the chapter examines the ‘turnaround’ challenge facing the local industry. Concerned policy makers are aware, as the above quotation shows, of the health sector insecurity inherent in complete reliance on medicines imports.