Talatona - Angola spends more than US$60 million on yearly basis to purchase medicines, Health minister Silvia Lutucuta said Tuesday in Luanda.
Lutucuta was speaking to the press during a workshop on the evaluation of Angola within the framework of regulatory authorities in the pharmaceutical sector.
The minister said that the national market is fundamentally supplied with imported medicines and the Executive wants to change this situation.
Silvia Lutucuta said that Angola still has a pharmaceutical industry in a very incipient phase and that the country is working on attracting private investment to change the situation.
“We want a strong industry that manufactures drugs, reagents and also equipment that serves not only the national market but also the international market”, she said.
She said that this workshop, promoted by the Regulatory Agency for Medicines and Health Technologies (ARMED), will give some indications of what the Angolan executive has to improve in the National Development Plan.
Aware of the need to implement a strong drug regulatory agency, according to the minister, the Angolan government requested support from the World Health Organisation (WHO) to strengthen ARMED.
The minister noted that the evaluation of ARMED's competencies by the WHO will allow the drafting of an Institutional Development Plan and its integration in the regulatory harmonisation project of SADC and the African Union.
The Regulatory Agency for Medicines and Health Technologies (ARMED) is a public institute, created on June 1, 2021 by Presidential Decree 136/21, complying with the regulatory standards of the WHO and the AU.
The workshop on the assessment of Angola within the regulatory authorities of the pharmaceutical sector ends on the November 18.
