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For decades, Africa has exported its low value-added raw materials and subsequently imported finished products made from these same resources. What if the continent finally decides to reverse this logic by transforming itself what it extracts, cultivates and produces?
The African economic paradox has been known since independence. The continent has huge mineral, agricultural, energy and human resources, but remains weakly industrialized. Cocoa, coffee, cotton, ores, oil, gas, wood or strategic metals still too often leave the continent in a raw or weakly processed form.
An essential part of the added value is created elsewhere: refining, industrial transformation, design, packaging, distribution, financing, intellectual property and marketing are captured by economies with a more developed industrial and technological fabric.
This model produces a major contradiction. Africa exports the resources needed by the world economy, but imports the manufactured goods needed for its own consumption. It thus sells relatively cheaply what it owns and buys much more expensive what other economies have made from its own raw materials.
Yet a transformation is beginning to emerge. Several African States are now seeking to increase local transformation, impose more national content, develop regional value chains and attract industrial investment as close as possible to production areas.
The issue goes far beyond exports. Transforming locally means creating industrial jobs, training technicians and engineers, developing local suppliers, strengthening energy infrastructure, increasing tax revenues and maintaining a greater proportion of value added on the continent.
However, this strategy requires much more than an administrative ban on exporting raw materials. A competitive industry requires reliable and affordable energy, efficient logistics infrastructure, long-term financing, technical skills, sufficiently large markets and a regulatory environment capable of securing investment.
The African Continental Free Trade Area can play a decisive role here. By transforming a juxtaposition of small national markets into a much larger economic space, regional integration can make possible industries that would be difficult to achieve on a single country scale.
This episode examines the possible transition from a resource-exporting Africa to a value-producing Africa. The central question is no longer just what the continent owns, but what it is capable of making with what it owns.
