Industry & Manufacturing/Force / 07
The continent is growing.
Its factories are not.
Manufacturing is shrinking as a share of output while the economy expands around it.
The state of it/01
Going the
wrong way.
Manufacturing fell to 9.6 percent of Sub-Saharan GDP in 2025, down from 10.2 percent in 2023. Manufactured goods slipped to 19.4 percent of merchandise exports in 2024, from 20.6 percent.
Meanwhile the regional economy grew 4.1 percent in 2025. So output is rising and the industrial share of it is falling. Growth is coming from elsewhere.
This matters because manufacturing is where large numbers of people move from low-productivity work into higher wages. A growth path that skips it employs fewer people per point of GDP.
The pattern is not uniform. Cement, beverages, packaging and food processing have grown, because they serve a domestic market and heavy freight costs protect them. Export-facing light manufacturing has not.
What decides it/02
What decides
whether a plant survives.
A factory running on diesel because the grid is unreliable pays several times the electricity cost of a competitor abroad. That difference lands directly in the unit price and it never goes away.
This is why industrial policy that does not begin with power is decoration. No tariff or tax holiday is large enough to offset it.
Most manufacturing is a scale game, and many African national markets are too small to support an efficient plant on their own.
That is the real argument for continental trade rules: not tariff savings, but the plant size those rules make viable. Until goods actually move across borders without weeks of delay, the argument stays theoretical.
Most African manufacturers import components. A currency shortage, a changed duty schedule or a slow port turns a working plant into an idle one within a quarter.
Manufacturers weigh predictability above almost everything else. A stable mediocre rule beats a favourable rule that might change.
An industrial zone provides serviced land, power and a customs regime. Those are necessary and they are not sufficient. Zones fill when there is a firm with a market and a cost position, and stand empty when there is not.
The zone was never the strategy. It was the site.
What it means/03
Unit cost is
a fixable thing.
Power price and port time are engineering and administration, not destiny. Both are being worked on across the continent right now. The places that solve them will take the factories.
The Brief/
The NextStep Africa
Brief.
What the engine turns up, every fortnight. From Lagos.
- What moved
- The change that mattered, and the number under it.
- How it connects
- The systems involved, and what one does to another.
- What it turns on
- What has to go right, and who is already building it.
- What to watch
- One indicator, and when it resolves.
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NextStep Africa / Lagos