Pharmaceutical Industry in Uganda: Discussing Challenges to be Faced by Rene Industries

Khushboo Vadodaria, Operations Director at Rene Industries Limited, discusses the challenges to be faced by the pharmaceutical company in Uganda.

“The challenges we face on a day to day basis, even prior to the pandemic, being a landlocked country involve logistics. Once you learn and perfect that, then it is very effective for the company. Other challenges are the high costs of production here. The utilities are quite high. Obviously, we have cheap imports coming from countries that enjoy economies of scale, such as India and China. There are high finance costs here compared to internationally because the risk to do business in Africa is very high and banks need that extra interest. There is heavy taxation on some pharmaceutical imports such as spare parts, importation of HVAC systems which are the heating ventilation systems that we use in the factory to ensure that there is no cross contamination of products which is a very expensive system to install. In order to comply with the National Drug Authority standards, we are mandated to install such expensive systems. Because it is very hot here and we must run them 24 hours a day, we have to introduce things like chillers and coolers to ensure that the temperature is perfect inside the facility. Everything is very expensive. We also pay taxes on lab chemicals that we use to test all our drugs. There are a few incentives with lobbying with the government and they are supporting us, but we obviously need to continue pushing for more incentives”, says Khushboo Vadodaria.

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