AI and robots offer new model for Africa’s textile industry

Some believe that the continent could harness AI and robots to accelerate its move into higher-value textile manufacturing.

The textiles industry has traditionally been strategically vital for emerging economies and seen as a key foundation for industrialisation. Given there is a relatively low barrier to entry and labour costs in emerging markets tend to be lower, the sector has often served as a means for countries to establish an industrial base, encourage industrialisation, and grow their economies.

Nowhere did this strategy pay higher dividends than in Asia. As the International Finance Corporation (IFC) explains, the “Asian Tiger” economies – which grew rapidly in the later part of the twentieth century by producing cheap textile goods for export abroad – enjoyed enormous success with this approach.

The countries “rebuilt and reimagined their postwar economies by mobilising colossal numbers of low-skilled and low-paid textile workers; putting them to work in efficient factories; developing modern ports that could deliver goods to important markets; and then weaving together regional – and later global – value chains,” the IFC notes.

“Between the early 1960s and the mid-1990s, the Asian Tigers transformed their economies into textile and apparel powerhouses. They then turned their industry-building knowledge – including skills, education, and government policies, among others – to assembling what is arguably the most complex and important manufacturing region in the world, producing goods ranging from T-shirts to satellites, and generating enormous wealth for their economies and higher living standards for their people,” the organisation adds.

“The Asian Miracle was a well-planned and well-executed project that numerous countries have attempted to emulate ever since.”

Indeed, several countries in Africa have attempted to promote industrialisation through developing their textile manufacturing industry. In 2024, Benin’s sovereign wealth fund, along with Dubai-based industrial group Arise Integrated Industrial Platforms, invested €550m ($633m) in an attempt to develop the country’s textiles and apparel space.

Rather than exporting practically all of its cotton raw for processing into garments overseas – and thereby missing out on more than 90% of the overall value – the idea was to produce the goods domestically instead.

Ethiopia has experimented with similar strategies, with the country’s textile-focused industrial parks designed to promote the growth of the sector and, ultimately, broader industrialisation.

AI and robots challenge old models

However, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to challenge the consensus on how countries in Africa think about industrialisation. Rather than simply replicating the Asian model, some believe that the continent could harness AI and other advanced technologies to accelerate its move into higher-value manufacturing and more sophisticated supply chains.

Kennedy Chengeta, an AI-focused entrepreneur and academic based in Pretoria, tells African Business that while the technology will not necessarily allow the continent to leapfrog textile manufacturing entirely, it can enable African manufacturers to adopt AI-native production systems from the outset – potentially making smaller factories more productive and efficient at an earlier stage of their development.

“Nothing about artificial intelligence replaces a press, a kiln, a berth or a substation. You cannot leapfrog a foundry with a language model. What you can leapfrog is the systems layer above production,” Chengeta says.

“Most African manufacturers carry no legacy IT estate, which means a processor still running paper job cards can move directly to cloud-native, AI-native operations without the twenty-year migration debt a European mid-cap is still servicing. Having nothing is an asset exactly once, and this is that moment,” he adds.

“More importantly, AI changes minimum efficient scale. Industrial engineering talent used to require a large plant to amortise it. Predictive scheduling, quality modelling, and maintenance optimisation now let much smaller operations achieve yields that previously demanded scale – and let networks of small producers be coordinated as a single virtual firm.”

Competitiveness warning

Dirk Willem te Velde, principal research fellow and director of the ODI thinktank’s International Economic Development Group, similarly notes that AI has the potential to help African manufacturing become significantly more efficient. However, he cautions that, because other markets are also adopting AI, it does not necessarily follow that Africa will become more globally competitive.

“Technologies such as AI and the internet of things (IoT), as well as greater internet penetration, can help manufacturing become more productive,” he tells African Business .

“That is one way of looking at it – but there are two issues with that. One is that, while the impact of AI and internet penetration is positive in Africa, it is more positive in other countries – the same level of internet penetration helps non-African countries faster than African countries, so you get divergence.”

“The other thing is that trends such as digitalisation and robotisation are growing faster outside of Africa. The introduction of robots into manufacturing, in particular, is happening much faster in countries such as China and South Korea, which means that their production processes are becoming more technology intensive and using less labour,” te Velde adds.

“Advanced economies are increasingly able to produce the same amount of manufacturing output with fewer people, with more AI, and therefore you need less manufacturing output in poorer countries, including in Africa.”

He suggests that African governments should start by thinking about how to reduce this divergence and ensure African manufacturers can keep up in an age of AI.

“We need to harness AI and digitalisation for African manufacturers, because if governments do nothing and leave it up to the market, then Africa could miss the boat again,” he says.

“There is a potential threat that Africa could lose out: that all the AI-powered manufacturing stays in richer countries and that another rung of the ladder is kicked away for African manufacturing.”

Reliable power needed, now

Energy policy is central to ensuring that African manufacturers keep up with global competitors. Chengeta notes that “Nigeria’s government has put manufacturers’ losses to power outages at around $27bn a year. South Africa’s version of the problem is tariff escalation and load management rather than outright failure, but the conclusion is identical,” he notes. Factories – particularly AI-powered or digitalised factories – cannot function without reliable power.

Developing industrial capabilities will also be vital: while Africa has a growing workforce and the youngest population in the world – with more than 60% of the continent under the age of 25 – skills training is needed to ensure its workforce can make optimal use of AI and other emerging technologies.

te Velde argues that there is a “window of opportunity” which Africa must take if its manufacturers are to keep up with the rest of the world and even, in an ideal world, to capitalise on new technologies to leapfrog and move up manufacturing value chains more quickly.

“Advances in technology mean it is cheaper and cheaper to produce a robot – and therefore cheaper for a robot to produce manufactured goods. At the same time, the cost of labour tends to go up – and so, at some point, there is an intersection where it becomes cheaper to produce goods with robots than with labour,” he tells African Business .

“In 2034, for example, we estimate that it will be cheaper to produce a piece of garment with a robot and 3D printing in the US than to have tens of people working to produce the same garment in Kenya,” te Velde explains.

“Business as usual is not enough – that will just mean losing out in a relative sense to other countries. We’re only at the start of the fourth industrial revolution, but Africa needs a more targeted approach to really make use of digital technology, including in manufacturing, as a way to industrialise.”

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