Repurposing Africa’s manufacturing: A means to address medical equipment shortages and spur industrialisation
Rajkumar Mayank Singh, Tony Blair Institute (TBI) Strategic Advisor to the Government of Rwanda, Antoine Huss, Regional Lead, Francophone West Africa, TBI, Jonathan Said, Head of Inclusive Economic Growth, Africa, TBI, and Kekeli Ahiable, West Africa Analyst, TBI
This blog is part of a series on tackling COVID-19 in developing countries. Visit the OECD dedicated page to access the OECD’s data, analysis and recommendations on the health, economic, financial and societal impacts of COVID-19 worldwide.
The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that around 22% of Africa’s population will be infected by COVID-19 within a year, possibly resulting in 150,000 deaths. In a recent forecast by Kearney, even in a suppressed pandemic progression scenario, demand for medical gowns, gloves, masks, swabs, and hand sanitizers will surge by ~1,600 percent from the baseline. In such circumstances, weak health systems and a lack of essential medical supplies leave countries in Africa particularly vulnerable.
Governments around the world have been panic buying essential medical supplies, while the World Trade Organization recently reported eighty countries that have introduced export prohibitions restricting the global supply of medical equipment. In 2018, as depicted in figure 1, industrialised countries like the U.S.A. and Germany had the largest market share in global export of ventilators and testing kits, while China led exports of face masks globally. With African countries importing most of their medical needs, panic buying and supply chain disruptions will significantly undermine the ability of African countries – and hence the world – to defeat COVID-19. Continue reading “Repurposing Africa’s manufacturing: A means to address medical equipment shortages and spur industrialisation”
Not all factories are the same. Today, their differences are bigger, more impressive and carry far-reaching implications for development in developing economies. Since the 1970s, industrial production has been organised in complex, multi-country networks of suppliers and providers. The conventional expectation was that this trend would be conducive to growing homogeneity, with converging techniques of production, salaries, standards and business organisation in the “world factory” system. However, as things do not often go “by the book”, manufacturing today encompasses far different realities. China has become the world’s leading manufacturing country. Early industrialisers have built complex value chains, delocalising non-core manufacturing activities to developing economies with relatively lower labour costs and growing domestic markets. The result: manufacturing is a collection of deeply different systems. And differences exist even within the same sector. Just look at the textiles industrial parks in Ethiopia that manufacture for and export fast fashion brands, such as Spain’s Zara. Or look at the robot-powered, fully automated smart factory of Adidas in Germany, which has been making customised mass production of textiles a reality in Europe since 2016. Consider the artisanal, luxury, on-demand, tailor-made production of Lamborghinis in Emilia Romagna, the highly automated export-oriented Audi production in Mexico, and the vertically integrated, only partially automated, domestic market-oriented BYD electric vehicle factory in Shenzhen, China. 