Biotechnology is often sold to Africa as a gateway to self-reliance and development. It can be defined as the application of biological systems or living organisms/parts of living organisms to develop or create products and technologies used in relation to different purposes. It includes many different methods that either occur naturally or are man-made varieties such as fermentation and genetic engineering. Politicians describe it as a means of securing food security, improving public health and creating jobs in an era of climate shocks and population growth. Development agencies present it as the inevitable pathway to modernity.
However, the actual experience of biotechnology in the daily lives of a large number of people on the continent points to an altogether more complex picture. It is the tale of how Africa has consistently been denied tangible authority and proprietorship in spite of the genetic resources that we have, the seeds, knowledge and information that contribute to a global industry worth trillions of dollars.
It only takes a short glance to see how this plays out. In eastern Uganda’s Busoga region, maize has long been central to livelihoods. It is second only to sweet potatoes in importance, providing both food and a small source of cash for rural families. A decade ago, surveys by the Organisation for Rural Development revealed the frustration farmers felt about their inability to access good quality seed. Climate change was making their planting seasons harder to predict. They wanted drought-tolerant varieties that could withstand new weather extremes. But the formal maize seed supply systems were either weak or non-existent. Hybrid seeds sold by private traders with little oversight dominated the market. The farmers were convinced that these hybrids would mature faster and bring in more money than the indigenous seeds they had always relied on.
What followed was a quiet collapse in seed security. Poor quality hybrid seeds became widespread. Many farmers in Bugiri District who were once proud of their ability to select and preserve seed, found themselves at the mercy of middlemen and commercial seed companies. The yields they expected never came, especially as changing weather patterns made hybrid seeds even less reliable. Families which had used their meager earnings to buy seeds, had to meet their losses which could not be absorbed. Meanwhile, elderly farmers still indicated as an argument that the traditional maize varieties which were slower to mature, never fail at all times to produce something, even during drought. They were more nutritious and marketable. This is not a small detail. It is a reminder that innovation in Africa is often defined from outside the continent, without listening to what smallholder farmers know about.
The pattern repeats in health research. The 1996 Pfizer Trovan trial in Kano, Nigeria is one of the clearest examples of what happens when Africa is treated as a laboratory rather than a partner. In the middle of a meningitis outbreak, 200 children were given an experimental drug without proper consent or safeguards. Eleven of them died and many others were left disabled. The fallout created lasting mistrust of Western medicine across parts of northern Nigeria. The families who recalled what had taken place in Kano boycotted the polio vaccination campaigns. To this day, foreign pharmaceutical companies have been accused of conducting clinical trials in Africa without full African supervision and with no data and benefit sharing with local health systems.
This same inequity extends into the realm of genomics. The numbers are clear. More than 80% of the genetic data held in major international databases comes from populations of European ancestry, even though they make up less than a fifth of the world’s population. Africans hold the greatest genetic diversity on the planet but only account for a tiny fraction of the datasets that are now driving drug discovery, personalised medicine and gene therapies. Treatments are being designed on the basis of data that do not reflect African genetic realities. Meanwhile, global biotechnology companies and consumer genomic testing companies are gathering African genetic resources with little oversight as to how it is utilised or commercially exploited. This is the 21st century version of extracting resources, as a growing number of 3rd world scholars now label it as genomic colonialism..
Agricultural biotechnology has delivered similar disappointments. The Gates Foundation-supported Alliance For A Green Revolution In Africa (AGRA) established in 2006, had vowed to pull millions of farmers out of poverty by means of improved seed, fertiliser and accessibility to markets. More than 15 years later, independent assessments show that AGRA has failed to meet its goals. In several of the countries where AGRA has concentrated its work, hunger has increased. The smallholder farmers who were supposed to benefit are often deeper in debt because they cannot keep up with the cost of commercial inputs. These initiatives have created dependency rather than resilience.
There are other older reminders of how Africa’s knowledge and biodiversity have been exploited. In southern Africa, the San people used the Hoodia cactus for generations as a natural appetite suppressant. In the 1990s, the plant’s active compounds were patented by a British company and sold to Pfizer for $21 million. The San received no royalties until they took legal action. Even then, they were awarded just 6-8% of the profits. That case is a blueprint for how indigenous resources can be turned into global products without fair benefit-sharing.
These examples are not accidents. They are part of a systemic pattern in which the continent’s genetic resources and human data are extracted, exported and monetised elsewhere. African governments, researchers and communities are too often left with little control over how these resources are used and with even less share in the profits. The global biotechnology industry justifies this as necessary for efficiency and innovation. But the reality is that Africa’s role has been reduced to that of a supplier, not a stakeholder.
However, there are reasons to believe this trajectory can be changed. Already, some institutions already have shown what biotechnology capacity building in African terms looks like. The Institut Pasteur Dakar in Senegal has been producing vaccines and now has become a major vaccine producer of yellow fever vaccines in Africa. Over the past few years, it has invested to extend into newer technologies such as mRNA, so that the needs of African public health will be met by vaccines developed and produced in Africa. The Biovac Institute in South Africa is another example. It produces a large share of child immunization in the country and has now ventured into the production of HPV and other vaccines locally. These accomplishments are important in demonstrating that one can reduce the donor dependency supply chains. Networks such as H3ABioNet are educating bioinformaticians on how to store and analyse the genomic data on African servers. This avoids the cost of outsourcing analysis to European or American cloud services and keeps control of the data within the continent.
Such initiatives are not large in comparison to the overall industry, but they do constitute concrete evidence of the possibility. They indicate that African-led biotechnology is not a dream.
The more critical question is how these efforts can be expanded and prevented from being swallowed by the same kind of exploitative structures that have dominated the field over the years. Africa must enact powerful laws on genetic sovereignty and learn that seeds, plants, animals and human genetic material are a strategic asset. Such legislation would ensure that foreign firms cannot patent native species or knowledge without the approval of the local populace. On a continental level, it is possible to discuss the establishment of an African Patent Office that can harmonise the laws regarding intellectual property, protect the traditional knowledge and bargain good terms of licensing with multinational companies.
The way biotechnology is funded should change as well. Excessive funding has been given to us by international donors whose terms compromise our independence. There is a need to invest more in open-sourcing biotechnology where tools, data and information on vaccine recipes remain royalty-free among African labs. The ethics of research has to be changed in a way that African scientific researchers and communities are central to the decision making on clinical trials and genomic experiments. This is demanding co-leadership roles by Africans, dictating locations where data is stored and ensuring the communities receive direct benefit to the outcomes.
Unless such changes are implemented, biotechnology will remain a two-edged sword to Africa. It will be promoted as a way of eliminating hunger and disease, when in fact the much more subtle patterns of dependency and extraction will never have been addressed. The seeds planted in African soil, the DNA collected from African people and the knowledge embedded in African biodiversity will keep enriching industries elsewhere. Africans will continue to see only a small fraction of the value that biotechnology generates.
This is not inevitable. It is a choice. The facts on the ground also in Dakar, Cape Town and Addis Ababa demonstrate that Africans are capable of developing their own biotechnology capabilities so long as they are not handicapped by the lack of resources, as well as the legal protection to do so. However, the window of opportunity to take control is running out fast and Africa may become permanently trapped in a position of reliance within the global bioeconomy unless immediate steps are taken to protect its genetic sovereignty, reform its research ethics and invest more in local scientists.
