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South Africa has opened a new facility in Pretoria, the seat of its government, where researchers and small companies can learn to make the main ingredients of medicines, a job the country almost entirely leaves to other nations today.
The facility is called FuturePHARMA, and it is meant to help the country depend less on imports and cope better when medicines run short.
It was set up by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, or CSIR, a South African government research organisation whose scientists work on health, energy, food, water, transport and other fields.
President Cyril Ramaphosa launched the facility on Wednesday 7 October 2026 at the CSIR's campus in Pretoria.
The CSIR said about 98% of the active ingredients used to make medicines in South Africa are imported, at a cost of around 15 billion rand a year, Business Day, a South African business newspaper, reported.
An active ingredient is the part of a medicine that does the treating.
Because the CSIR runs the facility, it is also the body describing the problem the facility is meant to fix, and a separate paper by a trade department economist, described below, gives the same figures.
A number that is easy to misread
The 98% describes the ingredients, not the finished medicines.
Dr Senelisiwe Ntsele, a senior economist at the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, the government department that deals with trade and industry, wrote in an undated opinion piece, in a personal capacity, that more than 60% of the medicines sold in South Africa are formulated locally, meaning mixed and finished into tablets or syrups here.
She wrote that about 98% of the active ingredients used in that work are imported, at about 15 billion rand a year.
Local companies therefore make many medicines, but buy the part that does the treating from abroad.
For HIV and TB medicines, Spotlight, a South African health news outlet, reported in December 2024 that those ingredients usually come from India or China.
A shared workshop, not a factory
Ramaphosa said FuturePHARMA is not meant to work as a conventional commercial medicine factory, according to SAnews, the government news agency.
Its value lies in shared equipment and expertise that would be too costly for one researcher, university or young company to build alone.
Dr Rachel Chikwamba, the CSIR's group executive for advanced chemistry and life sciences, said the facility is open to researchers in universities, in other research councils and in industry, so they can take products from an idea to the clinic and beyond.
Entrepreneurs can test whether an idea works and produce first runs for market testing, SAnews added.
Business Day explained that the facility will also help researchers work out how to make batches to the standard needed for testing in patients.
It works a little like a shared test kitchen, where a baker with a good recipe can try it at a larger size before investing in a bakery.
Chemistry on one side, biology on the other
The government news agency described two major areas of work.
The first covers medicines made from small chemical building blocks, such as painkillers and medicines that reduce inflammation, using methods that include flow chemistry, where chemicals move through equipment in a steady stream instead of being mixed in separate batches.
