Africa Must Measure What Remains Behind

Africa has spent decades attracting investment, building infrastructure, expanding trade and forming international partnerships.

These things matter.

But perhaps we have not always asked the most important question strongly enough:

What remains behind after the investment, project or transaction is completed?

A railway can be built.

A mine can begin production.

A factory can open.

A port can expand.

A foreign company can enter a market.

Trade between two countries can increase substantially.

But none of these figures alone tells us whether productive African capability has become stronger.

The deeper measure is what the activity leaves behind in the economy.

Did local businesses become suppliers?

Did workers acquire transferable skills?

Did engineers gain experience that can be applied elsewhere?

Did local manufacturers begin producing components that were previously imported?

Did processors move further up the value chain?

Did African businesses in neighbouring countries become part of the supply network?

Did knowledge remain?

Did productive capacity remain?

These questions may tell us more about development than the headline investment figure itself.

A question Africa has been asking for decades

African thinkers have wrestled with this problem for generations.

Among them was Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, the Tanzanian and Zanzibari political thinker and former minister, who wrote extensively about African economic independence and Africa's relationship with more industrialised economies.

Writing about China and Africa in 1987, Babu questioned whether relationships between developing countries would automatically produce equal benefits when one partner had significantly greater productive and industrial capacity.

His conclusions reflected his own political outlook and the international environment of that period.

But underneath that argument sat a question that remains useful today:

Can an international economic relationship increase Africa's own ability to produce?

That question does not have to be ideological.

It is an industrial question.

Africa participates in a very different global economy today

The scale of Africa's relationships with China, Europe, the United States, India, the Gulf states and other international partners has changed dramatically.

China-Africa economic cooperation, in particular, now extends across infrastructure, manufacturing, energy, mining, logistics, telecommunications, technology and trade.

The relationship cannot realistically be reduced to a simple story of either exploitation or development.

Different projects, countries and sectors produce different outcomes.

The more useful approach is therefore to examine the productive result.

What capability is being created?

What value is being added locally?

And who is participating?

Africa still has a large manufacturing gap

There is substantial room for Africa to increase its industrial participation.

UNIDO estimates that Africa accounted for about 18.5% of the world's population in 2024 but only around 2% of global manufacturing value added and 1.4% of manufactured exports. Source: UNIDO Statistics.

A 2026 UNIDO assessment of African regional value chains also found a persistent pattern: African economies continue to export a substantial amount of primary material while importing large volumes of manufactured and intermediate products. Manufacturing accounts for an estimated 88% to 94% of total imports across African regional economic communities examined in the study. Source: UNIDO.

That difference tells us something important.

Africa does not merely need more trade.

Africa needs more participation in the stages between raw material and finished product.

Those stages are where much of the industrial capability sits.

Processing.

Engineering.

Component manufacturing.

Packaging.

Testing.

Maintenance.

Fabrication.

Design.

Logistics.

Technology.

Research.

And specialist services.

Look at the space between the investment and the finished product

Imagine a major solar-energy project.

The headline may say:

US$500 million investment.

That tells us the size of the project.

But another set of questions tells us something different.

Who manufactured the mounting structures?

Who performed the civil works?

Who supplied electrical components?

Who installed the system?

Who provides maintenance?

Who transported the equipment?

Who manages battery storage?

Who trains technicians?

Who produces replacement components?

Who conducts environmental assessments?

Who supplies safety equipment?

If most of those activities remain outside the African economy, then the infrastructure may exist without a corresponding industrial ecosystem developing around it.

But if African companies progressively occupy those activities, something different happens.

An investment begins creating capability.

Manufacturing is larger than the factory

This is why Africa should perhaps broaden how it thinks about manufacturing.

Industrial development is not only the moment when a finished product leaves a production line.

There is an entire ecosystem surrounding production:

Raw Material

>

Processing

>

Components

>

Engineering

>

Manufacturing

>

Testing and Certification

>

Packaging

>

Logistics

>

Maintenance

>

Distribution

Each stage can contain dozens of businesses.

And every one represents an opportunity for African participation.

A mineral-producing country therefore does not only have a mining opportunity.

It may have opportunities in:

• mineral processing
• engineering
• fabrication
• industrial chemicals
• laboratory services
• machinery
• protective equipment
• transport
• water treatment
• environmental rehabilitation
• energy
• maintenance
• component manufacturing

This is where local economic depth develops.

The DRC provides a powerful example

The Democratic Republic of the Congo supplies minerals that enter some of the world's most sophisticated technology and energy supply chains.

Yet the more important development question is not simply how much cobalt or copper leaves the country.

It is:

How many productive activities surrounding those resources can increasingly take place within the DRC and elsewhere in Africa?

Mining equipment.

Metal processing.

Battery materials.

Engineering.

Transport.

Laboratories.

Industrial water systems.

Electrical equipment.

Fabrication.

Safety products.

These are all potential industries surrounding the resource itself.

The same principle applies across Africa.

Cocoa should create more than cocoa exports.

Cotton should create more than cotton exports.

Timber should create more than logs.

Lithium should create more than ore shipments.

Agriculture should create processing, packaging, machinery, logistics and food manufacturing.

Africa's resources can become foundations upon which wider productive ecosystems are built.

Regional production may be one of Africa's strongest opportunities

Not every country needs to manufacture everything.

That is neither realistic nor necessary.

One country may manufacture components.

Another may supply raw materials.

Another may specialise in processing.

Another may provide engineering.

Another may assemble the finished product.

This is how regional value chains become important.

Recent World Bank research argues that African regional integration can support production sharing across borders, particularly in areas including processed food, minerals and metals, machinery, transport equipment, textiles and energy. The same analysis notes that only around 15–20% of Africa's trade is currently intra-African, but that trade within Africa tends to be more diversified and manufacturing-intensive than the continent's trade with the rest of the world. Source: World Bank

That creates a powerful opportunity.

Africa does not necessarily need 54 isolated industrial strategies.

It can build connected production networks.

We need to see who can actually do the work

This brings us to a surprisingly basic problem.

Africa may have the businesses capable of participating in a value chain without those businesses being visible to one another.

A manufacturer in South Africa may not know that a suitable component supplier exists in Zambia.

A processor in Ghana may not know about specialist machinery services available in Kenya.

A mining company in the DRC may struggle to discover a regional engineering business.

An agricultural processor may import equipment because the appropriate African supplier cannot easily be identified.

The capability may exist.

The connection does not.

Electronic connection therefore becomes part of industrial infrastructure.

Start mapping Areas of Activity

Broad industrial classifications remain important.

But simply knowing that a company operates in Manufacturing & Industry is not enough.

What does it actually do?

Steel Fabrication.

Industrial Pumps.

Food Processing Equipment.

Battery Assembly.

Packaging.

Machining.

Textiles.

Electrical Components.

Agricultural Machinery.

Recycling Equipment.

Industrial Automation.

These are Areas of Activity.

When businesses identify themselves through the specific activity they perform, a very different economic picture begins to emerge.

We can start seeing:

where capability already exists;

where there are strong clusters;

where important gaps remain;

where neighbouring countries could complement one another;

and where an investment could create additional local supplier opportunities.

Rather than attempting to define every industrial activity centrally, these Areas of Activity can also grow progressively from the businesses and institutions actually participating in the economy.

Then investment can be measured differently

Imagine being able to look at a large infrastructure or industrial project and see:

32 Areas of Activity required

21 already supplied by African businesses

7 partially supplied locally

4 currently dependent almost entirely on imports

That is actionable information.

The conversation changes from:

“How much money was invested?”

to:

“How much productive capability did this investment activate?”

And then, over time:

“How much of that capability remained?”

This applies to every international partner

This question should not be directed only at China.

It applies equally to European investment.

American investment.

Indian investment.

Gulf investment.

African multinational investment.

Development finance.

Government infrastructure programmes.

And private African capital.

The nationality of the investor does not determine whether productive capacity develops.

The structure of participation matters.

Africa can welcome capital, infrastructure, technology and international partnership while still asking:

What are we learning?

What are we producing?

Who is supplying?

What can we manufacture next time ourselves?

What industries are forming around this activity?

What connections between African economies are being created?

What remains behind matters

Infrastructure can transform an economy.

Investment can unlock opportunity.

International partnership can accelerate development.

But their strongest legacy may not be the physical asset itself.

It may be the network of capability created around it.

The supplier that became a manufacturer.

The technician who became an engineer.

The processor that began exporting finished products.

The small factory that entered a regional supply chain.

The component previously imported that is now produced locally.

The connection between businesses in two African countries that did not exist before.

Those things accumulate.

And over time they become industrial capacity.

Africa should therefore continue measuring investment.

Continue measuring trade.

Continue measuring infrastructure.

But perhaps we should add another measure:

What productive capability remains behind?

Because the strongest investment is not only the one that arrives.

It is the one that leaves Africa more capable of producing after it has arrived. Source: UNIDO.