ELPS

José Manuel Durão Barroso: “Africa must maintain its commitment to the education sector”

Copyright Jornal de Angola. © Photo: DR

The former president of the European Union Commission, who now chairs the board of the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, José Manuel Barroso, said on Monday in Ethiopia that “we must continue to prioritise the so-called social sector, with an emphasis on health and education”.

Speaking to Lusa before leaving Addis Ababa, where he was attending the African Union Summit, he stressed that “Africa has defined a very clear path and strategy for this, and I believe that it is widely shared among leaders that these sectors need to be prioritised.” The first RNA vaccine factory in Rwanda is under construction.

The project exemplifies Africa’s efforts to avoid a repeat of the failures in the global distribution of Covid-19 vaccines. “We have seen that there is still a lot of injustice in terms of the distribution of resources for vaccination around the world.

In ten years’ time there will be more vaccine manufacturing capacity in Africa than we had before,” José Manuel Barroso estimated.