“When manufacturing follows people, strategy must arrive before the factory.” Jeremy Rogers
Jeremy Rogers is a product of the times we now inhabit: restless, interconnected and relentlessly focused on building what others defer. . His professional life has unfolded across Asia, Europe and Africa, a geography that mirrors the shifting centre of gravity in global health. That exposure has shaped a pragmatist rather than a purist, someone less interested in rhetoric, more in delivery.
Trained as a clinical expert, Rogers has turned his attention to one of the defining challenges of the 21st century: how the global South accesses essential medicines. Not as charity. Not as an afterthought. As infrastructure.
At the helm of Pharmadyne, a UK–Ghana pharmaceutical venture with Co-CEO’s Terry Mireku and Idris Shittu. His team is assembling a deliberately unfashionable solution of local manufacturing, regional supply chains and regulatory competence built close to the patient. He works alongside scientists and industry veterans whose résumés include GSK, Gilead, and Roche. The pedigree is global; the intent is firmly local.
The ambition is not modest. Pharmadyne aims to establish regional pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity in West Africa, reducing dependency on fragile import routes and donor-driven supply models. It is an argument that feels increasingly hard to refute. Pandemics exposed the brittleness of global supply chains. Demographics are amplifying demand. Climate, conflict and currency volatility are no longer abstract risks; they are line items.
Rogers’ approach reflects a wider generational shift. Fewer saviours. More systems. Less aid, more autonomy. If there is an opinion embedded in his work, it is this: Africa’s health crisis will not be solved elsewhere and shipped in a box. It will be built, regulated, and sustained on the continent itself.
Strengthening Regional Health Security
Rogers belongs to a cohort shaped by rupture rather than continuity. By 2025, policy in both the United States and Europe has shifted decisively toward industrial self-reliance. Strategic medicines now sit alongside energy and semiconductors as matters of national security. The language has changed. Resilience has replaced efficiency as the organising principle. The era of quiet dependency on distant manufacturers is, for all practical purposes, over.
Rogers reached this conclusion earlier than most. His career, spanning Asia, Europe and Africa, placed him inside global pharmaceutical supply chains just as they began to fracture. During the pandemic, he watched borders close, priorities harden and procurement turn inward. Africa, once again, was left waiting. That experience did not radicalise him. It clarified him.
The intellectual catalyst came from a piece of academic work that attracted little public attention but carried significant weight: ‘Bridging the Gap. Jan 2023.’ A research paper by Petra Ševčíková and Professor Allyson Pollock at the University of Newcastle, documenting the chronic insufficiency of essential medicines across East Africa. The analysis was unsentimental and damning. The system, as structured, could not deliver. Rogers recognised the diagnosis because he had lived the consequences.
Pharmadyne is the response. The venture focuses on producing high-demand generics and chronic-disease therapies locally, shortening supply chains that currently stretch across continents, currencies and political risk. Around 70 percent of medicines used in the region are imported. That statistic is not merely inefficient; it is dangerous. Pharmadyne’s aim is to replace dependence with capacity, and aid with industry.
This is not manufacturing as ideology. It is manufacturing as a necessity. Tablets, injectables, essential therapies. The unglamorous backbone of functioning health systems. Local production reduces exposure to shipping disruption, foreign exchange volatility and donor fatigue, an increasingly unreliable foundation for public health.
Reducing supply-chain fragility sits at the centre of the model. Localised production strengthens health security across West Africa while laying the groundwork for future vaccine localisation. It is healthcare policy expressed through industrial design.
For investors, the proposition is equally direct. A fast-growing market. Structural demand. Alignment with post-2025 US and European industrial policy. And a team shaped inside global biotechnology, now applying that discipline where it matters most.
The argument underpinning Rogers’ work is simple and increasingly difficult to dispute: Africa’s health future will not be airlifted in during emergencies. It will be manufactured, regulated and sustained at home.
Global Expertise in Clinical Operations
Rogers’ career has been shaped as much by proximity to knowledge as by proximity to power. At Kite Pharma, he worked within the clinical logistics function, deliberately placing himself at the operational core of advanced therapeutics. The emphasis was not abstract discovery but the machinery that sustains it: cost discipline, cold-chain control, cross-border shipment and the quiet choreography required to move complex products through US and EU regulatory systems. It was an education in how scale is preserved and where it quietly fractures.
That knowledge was gathered with intent. Rogers recognised early that logistics, not innovation alone, often determines who receives treatment and who is left waiting. The experience would later inform his own industrial ambitions, rooted in practicality rather than slogans.
Before this, as a Clinical Research Manager at Ipsen, he oversaw international studies while temporarily relocating to Paris to support delivery on the ground. The move reflected a preference for presence over distance being close to decisions, close to problems, and close enough to prevent friction from turning into delay. Cross-border coordination became routine rather than exceptional.
Earlier still, at Roche, Rogers worked as a Clinical Biomarker Manager on early-phase clinical development across a broad pipeline of products. The role sat at the intersection of science, strategy, and timing, where early technical decisions quietly determine long-term commercial outcomes.
More recently, this operational lens has expanded beyond pharmaceuticals alone. Rogers has been involved in incorporating and coordinating with the Critical Mineral Africa Group to design a global logistics framework aimed at improving healthcare delivery across the continent. The premise is deliberately systemic: align critical mineral supply routes, industrial transport corridors, and pharmaceutical distribution into a single, resilient architecture.
The implications are substantial. By rationalising transport flows and shortening supply chains, the model is expected to reduce financial burden, lower carbon emissions, and stabilise access to essential therapies. It treats healthcare supply not as an emergency response, but as infrastructure guaranteed, predictable, and designed to endure.
A Vision for Local Manufacturing and Equity
Rogers’ public advocacy is built around a simple, unsettling phrase: exported vulnerability. The argument is blunt. When a health system depends on imports, it inherits the fragility of every border, currency shock and political recalculation along the way. In his view, Africa’s path forward lies not in perpetual emergency shipments, but in local manufacturing, transparent supply chains and equitable access designed into the system rather than appended after failure.
That message finds its outlet through InPharmD, a platform he uses to interrogate uncomfortable gaps in global health delivery. With a community now exceeding 10,000 subscribers, it operates less as a broadcast channel than as a convening space connecting practitioners, policymakers and industry figures around the practical realities of health equity rather than its slogans.
Recent time spent back in East Africa has sharpened these convictions. Rogers argues that culture and lived wisdom are not soft concepts but structural assets. They shape trust, adoption, and sustainability. He sees the African diaspora as a critical, underutilised resource: professionals returning with technical skill, capital access, and global networks, capable of building industries outward from the continent rather than extracting value from it.
At the centre of his work sits a restrained optimism. Science, he believes, is necessary but insufficient on its own. Paired with compassion and anchored in local context it becomes capable of addressing even the most stubborn public health challenges. Not overnight. But permanently.
The Long Memory Dividend
‘Product has no memory. People do.’ Jeremy Rogers
There is a peculiar obsession in modern investment with the tangible: factories, tablets, devices, deliverables neatly shrink-wrapped and shipped. Products photograph well. They slot nicely into quarterly reports. They also forget everything the moment they are sold.
People do not.
As Jeremy Rogers puts it, “Product has no memory. But people do especially the long memory of the African people.”It is a deceptively simple observation, and a devastatingly accurate one. Supply chains break, strategies pivot, aid programmes rebrand. What remains is memory: who arrived with partnership and who arrived with extraction; who stayed and who disappeared when the margins tightened.
Investing in people is unfashionably slow. It does not yield instant press releases. It compounds instead. Skills persist. Trust circulates. Capability reproduces itself, often in ways that unsettle those who assumed dependency was permanent. A trained professional builds institutions. A supported community builds industries. A product, by contrast, waits passively to be replaced by the next one.
Africa’s challenge has never been an absence of goods. It has been an excess of short-term thinking imported alongside them. The continent does not need more things dropped in from elsewhere; it needs sustained belief in those already there. Memory matters. And in markets shaped as much by history as by economics, it may be the most undervalued asset of all.
The dividend from investing in people arrives quietly, over decades rather than quarters. But when it comes, it endures.