Cabinet has approved a proposal to encourage investors to set up joint ventures together with the State Pharmaceuticals Manufacturing Corporation (SPMC) to manufacture medicinal drugs locally. This comes in the wake of recommendations by the committee of officials to examine widening the process of manufacturing quality drugs locally with minimal cost.
The government has further stated that while most of the medicinal needs of the country is being imported from foreign countries, large sums of foreign exchange has to be spent on this process annually.
The proposal to encourage the setting up of state-private sector joint ventures to manufacture these medicinal drugs locally has been put forward to remedy this situation.