Traditional healers are likely to be first consulted as health providers due to socio-cultural settings in rural Tanzania. The estimated traditional healer/population ratio is 1:400 compared to the doctor/population ratio of 1:30,000.
Traditional medicines are an important part of healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa, and building successful disease treatment programmes that are sensitive to traditional medicine practices will require an understanding of their current use and roles, including from a biomedical perspective.
Chinese involvement in Africa has long included a prominent medical presence, with Beijing supporting medical efforts on the continent for decades. As China’s export capacity increased in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Beijing began to increasingly augment its efforts in Africa with the promotion of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM).
Traditional Chinese medicine provides China a surprisingly robust soft power tool in Africa, as Beijing increasingly exports medical expertise while also increasingly sourcing ingredients from Africa to meet domestic demand.
While China’s presence and influence in Africa is well documented – especially regarding resource extraction – another element is increasingly becoming an important economic and political tool: traditional Chinese medicine.
The inaugural China-Africa Forum on Traditional Medicine was held in Beijing in 2000, with 21 African health ministers in attendance. This push coincided with efforts by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which earmarked traditional medicine a policy priority for Africa in 2001. That same year the African Union declared 2001-2010 to be the ‘Decade of African Traditional Medicine’. This supranational focus aided Chinese efforts in promoting TCM in Africa, drawing on the parallels between African and Chinese medical practices.
Since then the global herbal medicine market has grown to US$60 billion, with Africa becoming the largest medicine export market for China in 2012. This figure is in addition to the domestic Chinese traditional medicine market, which accounts for 22.4 per cent of the national pharmaceutical industry, and one third of China’s gross medicine production. Despite rising incomes and increased access to western medicine, China’s growing middle class still prefers to consume TCM products: China’s domestic TCM market has seen 20 per cent growth for the past five years and now stands at US$114.2 billion.
With over a million Chinese expats in Africa, the number of TCM practitioners there is also increasing, serving both Chinese and local clientele. TCM often fills coverage gaps in African healthcare systems, as well as providing cheaper alternatives to government or private western medicine clinics. Financial restraints, existing traditional medicine usage and suspicions about the quality of medicine and care in mainstream facilities provide a ready potential consumer base for TCM.
The poor to non-existent access to medicine many Africans face is only worsened by the influx of fake medicine, 97 per cent of which entering Africa stems from China or India. A customs sweep in 2015 found that 90 per cent of traditional Chinese medicine imported into Australia contained unlisted ingredients, including; foreign animal and plant DNA, antibiotics,
decongestants and heavy metals. Moreover, several studies have found traditional Chinese medicine to be the leading cause of drug induced liver failure in up to 43 per cent of cases in China.
_0.jpg?itok=QU87XW8D){kind=tracking}
.jpeg?itok=vCj6bCRe)
