Future Of The Cannabis Market In Africa

With the cannabis economy gradually opening up in Africa, leading players talk about the commercial opportunities as also the consumer and patient wellness it offers. What are the barriers to building something new from the ground up in this space?

- Peter Engelbrecht

HAVING SPENT 25 years working with high-growth startups as a Chartered Accountant, Mark Corbett, the Managing Director of Highlands Investments, found himself working with a cannabis company based in Lesotho, a landlocked kingdom encircled by South Africa.

“I was intrigued by a category that was causing so much disruption across multiple industries including healthcare, consumer brands, tobacco, alcohol, and agriculture. I felt it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of this evolution and play a role in what is essentially the end of another prohibition.

“I am also a very firm advocate for the move away from lifestyle medications like opiates to more sustainable plant-based medicines like cannabis and psilocybin,” Corbett tells FORBES AFRICA.

With a new career in medical cannabis, he has found it to be equally exciting and frustrating. “Excitement because of the obvious opportunity to both change the way consumers engage with plant-based medicine and to generate much-needed employment and growth in markets like Africa; frustration because legislation and regulators around the world are moving unbelievably slowly to legalize and formally regulate the industry. This allows the black market to thrive and prevents patients from having access to standardized, regulated and clinically-tested medicines.”

Lesotho began paving the way for the cannabis market in 2017 and was one of the first African countries to grant licenses for the cultivation of cannabis for medical and scientific purposes.