Health Sovereignty key to Africa’s economic prosperity – Afreximbank

African governments must treat health as a pillar of economic and national security, with new investment models to tackle fast-rising non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and protect workforce productivity, says Oluranti Doherty.

Doherty, Managing Director for Export Development at the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), made the assertion, on the sidelines of a virtual panel session, at the Africa Press Day held in Nairobi, Kenya.

The event convened by healthcare company Roche, gathered journalists from nine African countries, alongside policymakers, economists, health experts, and development finance leaders.

According to Doherty, the institution is shifting from a narrow focus on traditional infrastructure toward health systems, diagnostics and specialist care, seeing them as core “infrastructure for human capital”.

She stressed that amid wars, mounting debts, and external pressures on Africa, it’s crucial to focus on what drives long-term prosperity – and health sovereignty’s a big part of it.

Doherty warned that the surge in NCDs, including cancers and cardiovascular disease, was undermining the continent’s growth prospects by eroding household incomes and weakening the labour force.

“As most of the speakers today alluded to, non-communicable diseases, including cancers, have surged across the continent, and it has become increasingly evident that improving access to healthcare is not only a social implication, but it has become an economic necessity,” she said.

Doherty said Afreximbank, a pan-African multilateral finance institution headquartered in Cairo, had deployed more than $3 billion into healthcare-related interventions, framing health as “an economic and national security issue”.

The package included $2 billion in advance payment guarantees during the COVID-19 pandemic “to support our member countries to access vaccines across the continent,” she said.

It also included $200 million in credit facilities to repurpose factories for the manufacture of medical consumables.

A further $300 million had been invested to support the African Medical Centre of Excellence in Abuja, Nigeria, a tertiary facility focused on NCDs such as oncology, cardiovascular and haematological diseases.

Developed in partnership with King’s College Hospital in London and inaugurated in June 2025, the centre is intended as a regional hub for complex care and training.

Doherty said the facility “hosts five theatres, three categorisation laboratories, and it’s performing very complex surgeries in the cardiac and cardiovascular space.

“It also houses state-of-the-art molecular laboratories, clinical laboratories in molecular genetics, hematology, chemistry, histopathology and microbiology”.

By prioritising early diagnosis and specialised treatment, Afreximbank hopes to reduce the economic drag of late-detected illnesses, which often push families into poverty and reduce labour productivity.

“When you strengthen diagnostics, you reduce late detection. And late detection is not only a clinical failure, but also an economic failure,” Doherty said.

She argued that a healthy workforce was as fundamental to growth as roads and power plants.

“A good road moves goods from one country to the other, but it cannot function without the people who build the road, operate, regulate and transport goods and trade them from one country to the other.

“If the workforce is unhealthy, then productivity drops, household incomes fall, and then businesses suffer. It constrains a nation’s competitiveness”.

Doherty said Afreximbank would continue to provide budget finance, advisory services, project preparation services, financing, and trade facilities to de-risk and promote healthcare projects and investments across Africa.

This, she emphasised, will further position the bank as a partner for both governments and private investors seeking to expand health infrastructure.

“We are thinking of health systems now as the infrastructure for human capital.

“The human capital is the real engine of economic growth and industrialisation for Africa, and that is why we are giving key focus to healthcare,” she asserted.