Making medicines in Mozambique

Questioning the Brazilian South-South Cooperation for the local production of generics

A joint-seminar IFAS-Research | Wits University

Building on her research, Alila Brossard Antonielli will talk about the production of medicine in Mozambique in the light of the Brazilian involvement in the local market of generics, and more generally the South-South cooperation. Her research is funded by a grant from Région Île-de-France, Science, Technology, Innovation and Society program and by IFAS-Recherche.

Discussant: Julia Hornberger, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology of Wits University

Tuesday 21 August 2018

12.30 to 14.00 | Wits Anthropology Museum

East Campus, Robert Sobukwe Block (formerly Central Block), West Corridor

Since 2003, the Brazilian government, relying on its experience of local production of antiretrovirals and other generic medicines in its public plants, supports the Government of Mozambique to implement its own pharmaceutical plant. This South-South Cooperation is providing the technology, training, equipment and funding for the creation of a public-owned health industry. Based on interviews, observations and archive research carried out in Brazil and Mozambique with political actors from both governments, experts and technicians involved, this communication will interrogate the practical conditions of a project that combines diplomacy, technical knowledge circulation and public health goals. She aims to show how the technical, economic and political hurdles experienced by the project reveal the stakes for manufacturing medicines and making them available in a limited resource country while challenging the idea of horizontal cooperation.

Alila Brossard Antonielli is a Brazilian-Italian PhD Candidate in sociology at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales’ Research Centre on Medicine, Science, Health, Mental Health and Society (Cermes3), Paris, France. Her research interests include socio-anthropology of health (HIV/Aids, access to medicines and sexual & reproductive rights) in Latin America and Africa.