0
0
By Correspondent, Nairobi
With fewer days left to finalize a global pathogen-sharing deal, African governments, researchers, and civil society groups are pressing wealthy nations to accept enforceable benefit-sharing, warning that voluntary commitments will repeat the inequities of COVID-19.
The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) and the Resilience Action Network Africa (RANA), backed by a coalition of African civil society organizations, have called on the European Commission and high-income countries to accept binding equity provisions in the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing (PABS) Annex to the WHO Pandemic Agreement as negotiators gather in Geneva for what could be the final round of talks before the May 2026 World Health Assembly deadline.
The Annex, which sets the rules for sharing pathogen samples and genetic sequence data used to develop vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments and how the resulting benefits are distributed, must be completed before the Pandemic Agreement, adopted in May 2025, can be opened for signature.
With the sixth meeting of the Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG 6) resuming on 23 March, roughly 100 low- and middle-income countries are pushing for mandatory benefit-sharing, while a bloc of wealthy nations, led by the European Commission, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, and Australia, favors voluntary commitments that critics say lack enforceability.
“Developing countries shared their pathogens, and their scientists identified new variants in record time. A fair agreement must ensure that this contribution is met with binding, enforceable benefit-sharing, not voluntary commitments that lack accountability,” said Diana Tibesigwa, AHF Regional Advocacy & Policy Manager for East & West Africa. “The Pandemic Agreement cannot be ratified without this Annex. Getting it right is in every country’s interest.”
The urgency is grounded in recent history. An analysis published in BMJ Global Health estimates that Africa, home to 17 per cent of the world’s population, received less than 3 per cent of COVID-19 vaccines. The same analysis points out that African scientists played a key role in quickly identifying and sharing genetic information about new SARS-CoV-2 variants, like Beta and Omicron, but their countries were some of the last to get vaccines.
They argue that the PABS system, “unless clearly defined and operationalized through a binding annex, risks suffering a similar fate” to the TRIPS waiver, which arrived too late to materially affect vaccine distribution. They caution that unclear terms like “mutually agreed terms,” pushed by wealthy countries, allow for broad interpretation and could make fairness rules ineffective during emergencies.
“What is decided in Geneva in the coming weeks will determine whether Africa’s investments in health sovereignty are rewarded or rendered meaningless. The PABS Annex is not a technical footnote; it is the difference between a pandemic system built on solidarity and one built on extraction.” Diana Tibesigwa, Regional Advocacy & Policy Manager, East & West Africa, AIDS Healthcare Foundation
The Divide in Geneva
Negotiations on the PABS Annex have been slow and contentious. Health Policy Watch reports that about 100 low- and middle-income countries are still insisting on required benefit-sharing, which means they want guaranteed access to vaccines, treatments, and tests in exchange for quickly sharing pathogen data. High-income country blocs, including the European Commission, favor voluntary and flexible commitments that developing countries say lack enforceability.
Geneva Health Files reports that after five rounds of talks, positions between the G6+ bloc and the developing world remain entrenched. The draft text, which expanded from seven to 37 pages as delegations reinserted contested language, has made progress only on narrow governance elements. Financing, a central issue, has yet to be meaningfully addressed.
At the core of the dispute is user registration and traceability. Tulio de Lima Campos, Head of Bioinformatics at Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, and Taime Sylvester, Senior Lecturer at the Namibia University of Science and Technology, have traced the structural failure to a single gap: the absence of any mechanism to record who downloads pathogen sequence data, whose products it contributes to, or whether benefits return to the health systems that generated it.
“The data is left. The benefits did not follow. The same governance norms that developed countries apply domestically to protect their own genomic data are precisely what developing countries are asking to be extended to data originating from their hospitals, laboratories, and communities.”
Tulio de Lima Campos
The authors writing on behalf of AHF reject the claim that user registration is incompatible with open science, noting that widely used genomic repositories already require registration and data-access agreements while serving tens of thousands of researchers globally. They explain that the pushback against traceability is not a technical issue but a decision about how to govern: choosing this path would be a deliberate choice to repeat the mistakes made during COVID-19, not just a simple mistake.
African Civil Society Rallies
The Nairobi press conference is happening at the same time as a letter organized by the Resilience Action Network Africa (RANA), urging African leaders and negotiators to take advantage of IGWG 6 as a crucial chance to complete a PABS framework based on fairness and legal clarity. The letter has been signed by organizations including BudgIT, the Centre for Health Law and Policy Innovation (Uganda), the Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development (HEPS Uganda), and the Treatment Advocacy and Literacy Campaign (TALC), among others.
“African civil society remains firmly behind Africa and the Equity Group in their pursuit of a transformative, enforceable, and equitable outcome. A PABS system anchored in equity, accountability, and transparency will ultimately prove more durable and effective. Ensuring PABS enters into force with strong equity safeguards is preferable to allowing negotiations to stall.”
Aggrey Aluso, Executive Director, Resilience Action Network Africa (RANA)
The letter also calls on African governments to deploy commensurate technical capacity to IGWG 6, bringing experts from across health, trade, and intellectual property ministries to engage substantively across all issues under negotiation.
Ahf’s Key Calls
• No Equity, No Agreement: The PABS Annex must not be approved without binding equity provisions. The Pandemic Agreement cannot be ratified without it.
• Cooperation, Not Extraction: All commercial users must face mandatory benefit-sharing, equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments; non-exclusive licenses and technology transfer for manufacturers in developing countries during health emergencies; and annual financial contributions.
• No Registration, No Access: User registration and traceability must be enforced. The EU’s current position supports anonymous access, a posture that undermines system integrity and creates real biosecurity risks.
• Protect Regional Production: The Africa CDC’s target of producing 60 percent of the continent’s vaccines by 2040 depends on enforceable PABS provisions. Kenya’s manufacturing ambitions depend on the same.
• Restore Civil Society Access: Observer access to IGWG negotiations, revoked at the third session, must be reinstated. Transparency is not optional.
A Global Moment
The campaign is part of a coordinated AHF advocacy push spanning seven African countries, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Zambia, timed around the resumption of IGWG 6 negotiations. On 18 March 2026, AHF Europe staged an advocacy action in Brussels under the banner “EU: Stop Blocking Health Equity,” followed by a press conference at Press Club Brussels Europe. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, speaking after the fifth IGWG session in February, said, “Strong multilateralism remains essential as countries have to face future pandemics together.”
