While Africa grows quality cotton, turning the crop into high-value products has been a consistent challenge. To break the cycle, Afreximbank’s African Textile Renaissance Plan aims to create a self-sustaining ecosystem that encompasses all the steps from growth to finished products. Neil Ford analyses the plan and discusses its chances of success.
The governments of Africa’s cotton-growing countries have long sought to capture more of the value generated by their crops, but the challenge has been turning those ambitions into factories, jobs and export orders. Yet Afreximbank has now drawn up a cotton industrialisation programme that it believes can create 500,000 new jobs and $10bn of import substitution by 2030, through the development of a much bigger African textile industry.
At a World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in March, participants estimated that about 98% of cotton produced in West and Central Africa was still exported as raw fibre. Beyond cultivation, the other activities in the value chain – spinning, weaving, dyeing, finishing and garment manufacturing, and the jobs associated with them, are largely located in the rest of the world.
Afreximbank wants to change that with its new African Textile Renaissance Plan, launched in 2024 in partnership with industrial zone developer ARISE Integrated Industrial Platforms (ARISE IIP) and Swiss textile machinery manufacturer Rieter. The partners aim to ensure that the continent secures 500,000 tonnes a year of cotton processing capacity within the next three to five years, with the further aspiration of adding another 500,000 tonnes at a later date. The plan aims to support $5bn in financing to make it a reality.
The strategy is important because it is attempting to ensure the development of all parts of the supply chain and supporting infrastructure simultaneously. Building spinning mills is relatively pointless if they cannot access reliable electricity, skilled technicians or spare parts.
Equally, producing more yarn achieves little without having customers further down the chain. The objective is therefore to create industrial ecosystems that take cotton from the farm through ginning and spinning into fabric and ultimately, finished clothing.
Building an industrial ecosystem
ARISE IIP already operates industrial zones in various African countries, including Benin, Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Chad, Rwanda, Gabon and Malawi. Under the textile plan, the countries involved will be selected partly according to energy availability and whether suitable industrial parks and infrastructure already exist.
Afreximbank also wants to standardise loan documentation and business plans to reduce the application process for textile projects to about two months.
Rieter’s involvement tackles another often overlooked problem: machinery. The company plans to establish repair and maintenance facilities in Africa, beginning with a facility at ARISE’s industrial park in Benin, alongside spare parts warehousing and possibly machine assembly if volumes justify it.
Training centres are also planned. Building factories without the technicians and supply chains required to keep expensive machinery operating would merely create a new dependence on imported expertise.
The potential benefits are huge. Afreximbank argues that cotton that currently generates about $40m as raw exports could earn as much as $800m when processed into garments, using Benin’s Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone as its example.
More broadly, the WTO and its partners estimate that $5bn of investment and capacity-building in the Cotton-4+ countries – Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali, plus Côte d’Ivoire – could generate about 500,000 direct jobs.
Yet the target and particularly the 2030 target date are extremely ambitious. Textile manufacturing is not simply cotton farming with a few factories attached. Africa must compete against enormous production clusters in China, Bangladesh, Vietnam, India and elsewhere that combine suppliers, skilled workforces, efficient ports and logistics and decades of manufacturing experience. It must also deal with its competitors’ established relationships with international buyers.
Africa also needs to attract far more investment. UN Trade and Development – the new name for UNCTAD – says investment announcements in African textiles, clothing and leather reached $1.78bn in 2024, up 36% from $1.30bn in 2023. That is encouraging, but more is needed.
Creating an African market
Exports alone will not be enough. The $10bn import substitution ambition implies that Africans themselves must buy a high proportion of African-made clothing. That requires competitive pricing, reliable quality and distribution networks capable of supplying consumers from Dakar to Johannesburg.
Imported second-hand clothing makes that particularly difficult. UN data shows that Africa accounted for 19% of global used clothing imports in 2021. Kenya alone has developed a huge mitumba economy around imported clothing, supporting an estimated 2m jobs. As a result, simply banning second-hand clothing imports, as some African countries have done with car imports, would carry enormous economic and political costs.
The answer is therefore not protectionism alone. Governments can use procurement to provide textile manufacturers with dependable demand for school uniforms, military and police uniforms, hospital textiles and other public sector requirements.
At the same time, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) should make it easier for cotton from one country to be spun, woven or manufactured into clothing in another.
This is where Afreximbank’s plan could become genuinely pan-African. Not every cotton-producing country needs an entire farm-to-fashion industry. Regional specialisation could be more efficient: cotton grown in Burkina Faso or Mali could feed spinning and weaving operations elsewhere before garments are manufactured closer to major consumer markets. What matters is that more of those stages remain within Africa.
The AGOA effect
The other big question is where African-made clothes will be sold outside the continent. For a quarter of a century, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) has given eligible sub-Saharan economies preferential access to the US market. Nowhere has its impact been more obvious than in clothing.
The US International Trade Commission (USITC) says that sub-Saharan Africa’s apparel industry has benefited substantially from AGOA. Normal US tariffs on clothing can be high, so any duties saved are important. Crucially, AGOA allows qualifying poorer African countries to make garments from imported yarn and fabric and still receive preferential access.
That concession helped Kenya, Lesotho and Madagascar build export-oriented garment industries without first constructing complete domestic textile supply chains. Kenya’s apparel exports to the US jumped from about $50m in the early years of the new millennium to $470m in 2024.
Yet this success also exposes one of AGOA’s weaknesses on cotton. USITC found that African apparel producers actually make little direct use of cotton grown in sub-Saharan Africa and rely instead on East Asian yarn and fabric. AGOA has therefore been much more successful at creating African garment manufacturing than at integrating Africa’s cotton value chain.
Afreximbank wants to bridge that gap. Rather than shipping African cotton to Asia and importing Asian fabric into African garment factories, the Textile Renaissance Plan envisages cotton being spun and woven within Africa before the finished clothing is exported. In theory, AGOA could then support far more African value addition.
Has Trump weakened AGOA?
However, AGOA has become a much less predictable basis on which to build a factory. The programme expired on 30 September 2025 before President Donald Trump signed legislation in February 2026 restoring it retrospectively, but only until 31 December 2026. The US Senate voted in August to push this extension on to the end of 2028, but this decision still needs to be approved by the House and Trump himself.
Even if that extension is rubber-stamped, uncertainty over AGOA’s long-term future matters hugely. A garment manufacturer deciding whether to invest tens or hundreds of millions of dollars needs to know what market access will look like over the lifetime of the investment, not merely in the short term.
The Trump administration has also signalled that any successor will be different. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer says a modernised AGOA should demand more from participating countries and deliver greater access for US businesses to support Washington’s America First trade policy. USTR began consultations on modernisation in April. President Trump has therefore not abolished AGOA yet, but it is less predictable.
That comes on top of the wider disruption caused by the administration’s tariff policies. Lesotho, where the clothing industry employs about 30,000 people, was initially threatened with a 50% reciprocal tariff in 2025, while Madagascar faced 47%. Those rates were then suspended as Washington revised its tariff arrangements, but the US tariff regime remains unstable. Afreximbank cannot therefore rely on AGOA to support its own plan.
From cotton producer to clothing exporter
Achieving Afreximbank’s targets will require progress at every level of the industry. Farmers need higher yields and reliable buyers; ginners need sufficient cotton supply; spinning and weaving mills need competitively priced, reliable electricity and finance; dyeing and finishing plants need water, chemicals and environmental controls; garment factories need skills and large orders; and designers, brands and retailers need distribution and marketing.
The 500,000 job target is possible precisely because the value chain is so long, but every link has to function. A clothing factory cannot meet international orders if fabric arrives late, while international brands will not shift procurement policies simply because Africa grows cotton. Afreximbank’s strategy is therefore less about increasing cotton production than changing what happens after the crop leaves the farm.
AGOA can still accelerate that process, particularly in the huge US clothing market. Yet uncertainty over its future shows why Africa needs to take more control over the economic future of its own cotton sector.
The real measure of success by 2030 will not simply be whether 500,000 jobs have been created, but whether African cotton has begun to support an integrated industry capable of competing across the continent and around the world.
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Afreximbank’s revolutionary cotton ambition
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