Africa's Cotton Exports Cost Millions Jobs and Income

Cotton grown in Africa leaves the continent as raw fibre and returns as finished clothing sold at a multiple of its original value. For the millions of people living in the continent’s cotton-growing regions, that gap means lost jobs, lost income and lost opportunity. A new continental effort now aims to close it.

The numbers are stark. Only 2% of the cotton produced in Africa’s major producing countries is processed locally. The rest is exported raw, feeding factories elsewhere while African communities capture a fraction of the value their harvest creates. A coalition of governments and international bodies is trying to change that, with targets that would reshape daily life in some of the world’s poorest cotton regions: 25% local processing by 2035, roughly 500,000 new jobs, and $6bn in value-added textile products.

The effort took shape in 2024, when Mali, Benin, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Chad and Côte d’Ivoire joined the World Trade Organization and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization to launch the Partenariat pour le Coton, or Partnership for Cotton. The initiative is designed as a regional “textile corridor”, allowing cotton grown in one country to be spun, woven and sewn into garments in another. Officials describe it as a way to build the economies of scale African manufacturers need to compete with established global rivals.

Implementation began in March, after a two-year diagnostic phase, on the margins of the WTO ministerial conference in Yaoundé. The stage brings together international partners, including Afreximbank, which will help mobilise $5bn in new investments to expand spinning, weaving and garment manufacturing capacity across the participating countries.

For George Elombi, president and chairman of Afreximbank, the current arrangement defies justification. “I call it, and we must accept it as, an anomaly. We grow cotton and export it in its raw state, then we buy it back in the form of a shirt for ten, maybe fifty times the price, with the name of a non-African brand, obviously,” he said. He argued that within 15 to 20 years, Africa will have left the raw cotton export business entirely, moving into textiles and clothing exports so that more money stays on the continent to improve lives and livelihoods. He promised to ramp up the bank’s investments in the sector.

The bank has already put money behind that vision. In Benin, it helped finance and develop the Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone in partnership with Arise Integrated Industrial Platforms, in which it owns a stake. Building on that experience, Afreximbank is supporting special economic zones dedicated to cotton processing in Cameroon, Chad and Mali, with similar discussions under way in Kenya, Rwanda and Nigeria.

Africa’s cotton production is concentrated in its central and western regions. Mali led the continent with roughly 1.3 million bales in 2025, followed closely by Benin at 1.2 million. Côte d’Ivoire produced 745,000 bales, Cameroon 650,000, Burkina Faso 610,000, Sudan 550,000, Tanzania 400,000, Nigeria 350,000, Chad 320,000, and Egypt between 250,000 and 320,000.

Yet processing capacity alone will not deliver the promised jobs and incomes. Manufacturers need reliable access to markets large enough to sustain profitable growth, and that task has grown harder as major powers such as the United States increasingly use trade as a geopolitical tool. Africa’s most durable option, analysts argue, is to grow its own consumer base. Intra-African trade accounts for only about 10% of the continent’s apparel exports and 17% of its imports, a figure that captures both the scale of the challenge and the opportunity for home-grown fashion brands.

Meanwhile, the African Continental Free Trade Area offers a framework for local brands to compete against cheaper imports. But officials and entrepreneurs agree that a trade agreement alone will not create sustainable demand. African designers must win over domestic consumers and persuade them to buy African as a matter of pride and identity.

That remains an uphill battle, according to Wandia Gichuru, CEO of Vivo Fashion Group. Speaking at the Africa Soft Power Summit in Nairobi in May, she said Africans themselves have a crucial role in elevating local brands by choosing them over global substitutes. “In this part of the world we have not seen fashion for the business opportunity it provides,” she said. “Our vision at Vivo is that of an Africa that is dressing herself. That may not be as big a challenge in West Africa. But in East Africa we tend to dress very European and wear predominantly second-hand clothing.”

Gichuru also stressed that quality must come first, since consumers’ livelihoods and choices ultimately decide which brands survive. “We should not be buying African brands simply because they are African. We should be able to compete. There should be enough of us at all price points and in all market segments,” she said.

Whether the corridor delivers on its promise of half a million jobs and billions in added value will depend on both the factories being built and the shoppers willing to fill them with African-made clothes.