Africa is about to make its own cholera vaccines — start to finish, for the first time

The African Development Bank has signed a $15 million agreement with South Africa's Biovac to build the continent's first end-to-end oral cholera vaccine factory — no longer dependent on waiting for supplies shipped in from far away. The same site will also make Africa's first locally produced inactivated polio vaccine and shots that guard against pneumonia and meningitis. Biovac's more than 300 staff, half of them women, are turning imported dependence into homegrown supply.