Client Context

Kenya BioVax Institute is a state corporation incorporated in 2021 to manufacture, package, and commercialise vaccines and other health products and technologies. Its mandate was catalysed by two converging pressures. First, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the cost of vaccine dependence: African governments could not secure adequate supplies as developed countries prioritised their own citizens, and Africa's capacity to manufacture vaccines, less than two percent of continental demand, was exposed as a structural vulnerability. Second, Kenya's impending exit from GAVI support in 2027 meant the country needed a domestic production capability before the subsidy architecture that had sustained immunisation coverage was withdrawn.

The political context reinforced the institutional imperative. President Ruto was appointed by the African Union as the continental champion for local manufacturing at the 37th AU Ordinary Session in February 2024, elevating Kenya BioVax from a national health project to a continental signal. The Institute's strategic plan was therefore not a bureaucratic compliance exercise. It was the document that would establish whether KBI could translate political commitment into an implementable road map.

The Challenge

Formulating a strategic plan for an institution that is simultaneously new, nationally consequential, and technically specialised presented a specific set of challenges.

The primary challenge was institutional. KBI had been operational for less than two years. It had a mandate, a leadership team, and a facility site, but it had not yet established the operational history that most strategic planning processes draw on. The situational analysis had to be built from stakeholder engagement, comparative sector intelligence, and primary data collection across the Institute's management, staff, and external partners rather than from programme delivery data.

The second challenge was scope complexity. KBI's mandate spans manufacturing, regulation, commercialisation, research and development, and international partnership. Each domain has its own strategic logic, its own key success factors, and its own set of external actors, from the Pharmacy and Poisons Board and KEMRI domestically, to the Africa CDC's Partnerships for African Vaccine Manufacturing framework and bilateral technology transfer partners internationally. A strategic plan that treated each domain in isolation would produce a fragmented document rather than a coherent institutional road map.

The third challenge was the standard the plan needed to meet. The Fifth Generation Strategic Plan Guidelines from the State Department for Economic Planning set specific compliance requirements covering methodology, stakeholder engagement, performance contracting alignment, and monitoring framework design. The plan also needed to hold up to the scrutiny of the KBI Board, the Ministry of Health, and the development partners who would assess it as a basis for funding and partnership decisions.

Our Approach

ACAL structured the engagement around the Fifth Generation Strategic Plan methodology, applying it to KBI's specific institutional context across five sequential phases. The process was anchored by a multi-stakeholder engagement programme covering the Board, senior management, staff, and external stakeholders from the Ministry of Health, KEMRI, the Pharmacy and Poisons Board, the National Quality Control Laboratory, KEMSA, KEVEVAPI, KAVI, and partner universities including the University of Nairobi and JKUAT.