The National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, has achieved Maturity-Level-3 certification, which is essential for the production of vaccines.

This means that NAFDAC has been found to be effective, and they may be eligible for inclusion in the transitional WHO Listed Authorities list, which will eventually include the world’s regulators of reference – that is, regulatory authorities that should be globally recognized as complying with WHO and other international standards.

Nigeria joins Egypt Ghana and Tanzania as effective regulatory systems on the African continent.

WHO’s assessment of regulatory authorities is based on the ‘ Global Benchmarking Tool’ – an evaluation tool that checks regulatory functions against a set of more than 260 indicators.

At a press briefing in Abuja, Professor Mojisola Adeyeye, Director-General of NAFDAC, said Nigeria was the third in Africa and one of just a few countries in the world to acquire the certification.

She stated that WHO, made the declaration following a series of rigorous examinations conducted by the health body and that NAFDAC met all of the 868 standards, which she described as “outstanding.”

The NAFDAC Director-General stated that the organization has already begun preparations to ensure that the country achieves maturity-level-4 status, which would allow it to manufacture medications that would be accepted throughout the world.

Alhaji Yusuf Suleiman, Chairman of the NAFDAC Board of Directors, expressed gratitude to the Federal Government for its assistance in the timely provision of resources to set the organisation on the right track.

Egypt and Nigeria were also chosen in February 2022 as recipients of mRNA technology from the WHO mRNA Technology Transfer Hub.