After being considerably behind in the global industrialization race, the African continent is now able to industrialize itself without having to copy other models, betting on the digitization of production methods, on the use of green technologies and exploiting the potential of the Free Area African Continent Exchange (AFcfTA). This was revealed by the “White Paper on Sustainable Industrialization in Africa”, released at the end of last week by the London School of Political and Economic Sciences, a work which explains how, in Africa, the structural transformation of economies, resulting in most cases in a transfer of resources from the primary sector to the secondary sector, then to the tertiary sector, tends to bypass the industrialization sequence.
So far the efforts made on the continent in terms of industrialization are believed to have failed, even if the reality is more nuanced and complex: the share of the industrial sector in total employment on the continent fell to 11.8% in 2004, from 12.3 % in 1991, before recovering slightly to 13.6% in 2021.
There are also discrepancies between the various sub-regions of the continent: in North Africa, jobs in industry represented 26% of the total in 2021, a level close to the threshold of industrial take-off. This is followed by Southern Africa (17%), West Africa (13%), Central Africa (11%) and East Africa (10%). The report explains that the continent’s low levels of industrialization are explained, among other things, by the harmful effects of structural adjustment plans, which have pushed African countries to abandon the levers of industrial policy and allowed liberalized markets to take advantage of their comparative advantages. This fostered the rise of capital-intensive mining and oil extraction rather than the development of labour-intensive manufacturing industries.
While industrialization remains one of the best responses to the urgency of creating 12 million jobs a year to absorb new labor market entrants, the continent will no longer be able to copy the models that have already proved their worth: the African countries today, the report reveals, face increased competition in the manufacturing sector, both in international and domestic markets. Global value chains are not the same as they were in the 20th century and the rules of global trade have changed, moving towards more restrictions and regulations.
The report indicates that Africa has some assets to industrialize in a different way and in a more sustainable way: the first of these is to exploit the awareness of the ecological emergency on a global scale to adopt clean industrial production methods and green technologies, capitalizing the continent’s abundant resources in the field of renewable energy and maximizing the added value of metals necessary for the energy transition such as copper, cobalt and lithium.
The continent can also focus on the digitization of production processes to increase the value of all its raw materials, including oil, gas, timber and agricultural products. Furthermore, the development of regional value chains can also accelerate the industrial transformation of African countries. The African Free Trade Area is expected to create a vast common market of 1.3 billion consumers, and as such offers a unique opportunity to promote these regional value chains: Africa is indeed becoming the largest market of consumption in the world, with a population that will increase from 1.2 billion people today to 2.5 billion in 2050. [Da Redazione InfoAfrica]
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