A chorus of voices from across the global health community is issuing the same stark warning: when the next pandemic strikes, Africa will once again be the most catastrophically exposed continent on earth. And despite the devastating lesson of COVID-19, which exposed yawning gaps in vaccine access, diagnostic capacity, and health system resilience, the world is no better prepared today than it was in 2019.
The question of pandemic preparedness has climbed back up the international agenda in the months since the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo deepened concerns about health system fragility. But expert assessments suggest that political attention and funding commitments are not keeping pace with the accelerating risks. Climate change, urbanisation, deforestation, and the expansion of human settlement into previously untouched ecosystems are all increasing the frequency with which novel pathogens make the leap from animal reservoirs to human populations.
Africa vulnerability is structural. The continent has historically depended on external manufacturing capacity for vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostic reagents. During the COVID-19 pandemic, African nations waited months longer than wealthier countries to access life-saving immunisations. The Africa CDC and the African Union have made local vaccine manufacturing a strategic priority, and progress has been made through initiatives like the Platform for Harmonised African Health Product Manufacturing. But the infrastructure remains nascent, and scaling up production to meet continental demand in an emergency would take months that many patients do not have.
Surveillance capacity is another critical gap. Many African nations lack the laboratory networks, data-sharing systems, and workforce needed to detect and characterise novel pathogens before they spread. The continent experience with Ebola demonstrated that early detection can make the difference between a contained outbreak and a continent-wide emergency — yet investment in these systems has remained inconsistent and largely donor-dependent.
The global health architecture designed to respond to these challenges — the International Health Regulations, the Pandemic Accord negotiations, the World Health Organization emergency funding mechanisms — has been mired in political disagreement, particularly over equitable access to medical countermeasures during emergencies. For Africa, the risk is that the agreements reached will encode the same inequities that made the COVID response so lethally unequal.
Without urgent action — not pledges, not frameworks, but concrete investment in health systems, manufacturing capacity, and equitable access agreements — the next global health crisis will find Africa as exposed as it was in 2020. The difference is that next time, the world may not have the luxury of time to develop vaccines in record-shattering speed. The next pathogen may spread faster, kill quicker, and leave fewer options.
