Force 07 / Industry & Manufacturing
The continent is growing. Its factories are not.
Manufacturing is shrinking as a share of output while the economy expands around it.
Where it stands
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
What decides whether a plant survives.
Power cost per unit
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.
Scale needs a market
Most manufacturing is a scale game, and many African national markets are too small to support an efficient plant on their own.
Inputs and predictability
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.
What outsiders miss
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.
What it means
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.
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