Healthcare in Africa

Africa’s population continues to grow rapidly. Over the past 20 years it has increased annually by 2.5% and is expected to rise to 2.4 billion by 2050. Africa also bears 25% of the global disease burden and is served by merely 2% of the world􀂶s healthcare workforce.

As the population booms, there will be an increasing need for high quality, accessible healthcare services to achieve universal health coverage (UHC), where all people will have the health services they need without facing financial hardship. The target to achieve UHC by the year 2030 was set out in the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 and provides a goal for the continent to work towards.

Predicting how the economy is going to respond to the COVID-19 situation, will not give an accurate picture as with things changing daily. However, as an organization, we are keeping up to date with the ongoing changes and regulations and will implement them wherever we can in order to ensure a safe and profitable business.

In North Africa, significant efforts are being made to develop the healthcare sector, and investments in medical insurance, vaccinations, access to water and better nutrition have resulted in the decrease of infant and maternal mortality and longer life expectancy.

With the current situation and the global pandemic, every organization and sector understands the ongoing uncertainty.

Healthcare provision and hospitals are going to experience a paradigm shift post the COVID-19 era. Being one of the majorly overloaded industries, the healthcare sector continues to experience mounting pressure to effectively manage patient care and demand during this pandemic, and will now be facing a new set of challenges going forward.

This means additional Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and digital transformation will play a critical role in the future delivery of healthcare. As the healthcare sector starts to navigate its future challenges, the need to provide a safe, secure, and efficient hospital environment is paramount.

FMCG in Africa

FMCG retailers operate in a low margin environment. As a result of this, the existence of a large market is crucial to the success of these companies. Despite Africa having a population of one billion people, the continent remains relatively under-served by FMCG companies.

The graph below shows the ten African countries with the largest population sizes between 2013 to 2030 (estimated) according to the UN Population Division.

As FMCG retailers sell products that are classified as necessities, income per person is a less important consideration than for retailers of luxury or durable products. The trend in income levels is still important in order to establish what types of FMCG products can be offered to a specific market.

Despite understanding the trend within the market and the outlook for the future, given the unexpected turn of events creating the global pandemic, we understand that it is important to analyze the impact of this as COVID-19 has recently created a significant crisis for FMCG retailers globally.

With restricted and preventative shopping becoming the norm around the world, many consumers have substantially reduced their physical shopping outings, opting for riskaverse alternatives, such as those found online.

AME consumers too have limited their shopping in supermarkets and grocery stores. With massive traditional and informal trade outlets, and limited or non-existent modern trade outside of a handful of cities or just a single major city, AME has probably been one of the least prepared regions for the shift to online shopping.

Despite this, post COVID-19, it is expected that as markets open and lockdowns are eased, many consumers will return to physical brick and mortar stores. But However, a significant number of consumers are sending clear signals to retailers that they intend to stay in the contactless, ‘online􀂶 shopping environment after the COVID-19 lockdown.

When consumers􀂶 pre- and post-COVID-19 online shopping behaviours were compared, it was found that a growing proportion of consumers especially in Africa, intend to continue to shop online even as after living restrictions are eased. This will not only be for the top online categories of fashion and electronics which provided access to goods from beyond country borders (though this too will intensify as access to these goods becomes even further constrained), but it will also increasingly extend to FMCG shopping in a far bigger way. 19% more Nigerians, 18% more South Africans, 10% more Kenyans and Emiratis intend to shop for packaged food online post-outbreak than before.