File photo shows women process clay materials at the Kazuri factory in Nairobi, Kenya, Jan. 8, 2013. Kazuri, which means "small and beautiful" in Swahili, began in 1975 as a workshop experimenting on making handmade beads. The factory employs over 340 women, mostly single mothers. Its handmade and hand-painted ceramic jewellery and pottery products have been exported to over 30 countries and regions worldwide. (Xinhua/Meng Chenguang)
LUSAKA, March 25 (Xinhua) -- The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) has urged African countries to focus on developing labor-intensive industries and provide effective logistics and transport infrastructure from factories to ports to become globally competitive industrial players, according to an emailed statement on Friday.
Benedict Oramah, the bank's president said reports have shown that African industries were often more competitive that those in Asia at the factory level but that the advantage was lost once goods moved from the factory to the ports due to high logistics and transport.
"Labor is competitive in Africa but is not a tradable asset. At this stage, it might be better to import fabrics and transform them into garments or to produce and assemble other labor-intensive light-manufacturing goods rather than processing raw materials in a way that may not enable Africa to compete globally," he said during a panel discussion at the 2017 Africa CEO Forum in Geneva, Switzerland.
African governments, he said, should support the competitiveness of local industries by reducing the infrastructure gap while African enterprises should analyze global industrial value chains and set up activities in areas where they could deploy Africa's competitive advantage which currently favored labor-intensive industries.
He however discouraged protectionism, saying such an approach would not serve the interest of African economies as it could be an impediment to the creation of regional value chains and could play against the growth of local companies.
The panel discussion was held under the theme "Will Economic Nationalization Put Africa First?"
