Africa’s industrial moment is not waiting for more money. It is waiting for the right kind — structured correctly, sequenced intelligently, and aimed at the right stage of a project’s life. Afreximbank’s Oluranti Doherty on why the continent’s financing problem is really a coordination problem.
Why this series exists
Our new editorial initiative seeks to unearth an answer to a question that most development institutions have debated but few have answered: why does a continent that grows the world’s finest cotton wear clothes made somewhere else — and what would it actually take to change that?
The answer is not, as it is so often presented, a story about roads or ports or missing technology. For centuries, the processing of Africa’s raw materials into finished goods happened elsewhere by design — and the wealth that process generated remained elsewhere by consequence. That is the inheritance this generation of African industrialists, financiers, and policymakers is trying to overturn. Our programme is the journalistic record of whether they are succeeding.
The initiative is built on a straightforward premise. Africa’s industrial potential is not poorly understood because the facts are unavailable. It is poorly understood because the right stories are not being told, to the right audiences, in the right register. A $40 million commodity export that could be an $800 million manufacturing industry is not, primarily, a financing problem. It is a narrative problem — and a narrative problem is one that journalism, data, and sustained institutional distribution can address.
The programme is anchored in cotton and textiles because the value chain is visible, traceable, and human — from the smallholder farmer harvesting seed cotton by hand to the factory floor where garments leave for European retailers. But it is not, ultimately, a story about cotton. It is a story about whether Africa can manufacture, add value, and compete globally — and what the continent’s own financial institutions, entrepreneurs, and policymakers are doing to make that happen.
We distribute our journalism through the institutional wire network that reaches the fund managers, analysts, trade ministers, and development finance executives who price African risk every day. The argument is simple: the story Africa tells about itself is not the story its industrial performance warrants.
To begin that work, our editorial team sat with Ms. Oluranti Doherty — Managing Director for Export Development at Afreximbank — to understand what two decades inside the actual mechanics of African industrial finance looks like from the inside. The conversation ranged from the mathematics of a cotton boll to the architecture of a $70 billion African capital coalition, from the five-year ramp-up period of a new factory to the $4.2 billion annual cost of a bad story.
The math behind the optimism
The numbers, when she lays them out, are startling less for the size of the loss than for the size of the opportunity still sitting on the table. Raw Beninese cotton, from farm to port, sells for $1,500 to $2,000 a metric tonne. Transformed into garments, the same fibre is worth $16,000 to $20,000 a tonne — a value increase of ten to fifteen times. Scale that across 40,000 tonnes of annual production, and a $40 million commodity export becomes an $800 million manufacturing industry.
“Africa produces and exports cotton lint,” Doherty says, “but much of the value generated in the cotton, textile and garment value chain occurs through spinning, weaving, dyeing, finishing, garment manufacturing, branding and retailing” — steps that have historically happened somewhere else. Benin’s industrial zone, known as Glo-Djigbé, was built specifically to bring those steps home.
« What we need to prove more is that it can be replicated programmatically in every cotton-producing country. »
Not as a copy-paste template, she is careful to say, but adapted to the politics, infrastructure and ambitions of each place that tries it.
A different theory of the challenge
For years, the general explanation for why more African countries haven’t replicated that success has been simple: not enough financing. Doherty, whose job is quite literally to arrange that financing, disagrees. And her disagreement is, oddly enough, the most encouraging line in the whole conversation, because it points to a solvable problem rather than an intractable one.
“It is relevant,” she says of financing, “but what you need is a combination of financing solutions” tailored to each stage of a project’s life — patient equity for the earliest, riskiest years; long-term project debt once a factory is built; working capital structured around the actual rhythm of the business, whether that trade cycle runs 60 days or 360. The failures she has seen tend to come from mismatches — a seven-year project financed with three-year money — rather than from an absence of capital altogether.
« Having financiers who can understand that this is the reality of industrial and manufacturing projects is very important — and increasingly, I believe, they do. »
That is a fixable problem, and Afreximbank has spent the past several years building the tools to fix it: a dedicated project-preparation facility to help entrepreneurs get their first plans investment-ready, and FEDA, a Rwanda-based equity fund built specifically to supply the patient capital that traditional lending cannot.
Closing the coordination gap
When Doherty steps back from individual transactions to describe the larger architecture of African industrial finance, her diagnosis shifts from frustration to something closer to strategic clarity. The continent does not lack capital. It does not lack viable projects. What it has lacked — until recently — is the mechanism for connecting the two.
« Africa has capital. Africa has viable projects. What has been missing is not resources — but alignment »
“Africa has development institutions, commercial banks, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds,” Doherty says. What has been missing is a problem she calls “systemic fragmentation,” in which capable institutions work in silos rather than in partnership.
The Alliance for African Multilateral Financial Institutions (AAMFI), a coalition Afreximbank helped launch, has brought together African-owned lenders with a combined balance sheet of $70 billion — capital that can now move behind large industrial projects in a coordinated way rather than depending on any single institution to shoulder a deal alone.
Rewriting the risk premium
Researchers have estimated that negative media narratives about the continent add up to $4.2 billion a year in inflated sovereign borrowing costs; Doherty believes the true figure, once corporate financing is included, is considerably higher.
« We are not asking for favorable risk assessment as Africans. We are simply requesting an accurate one. »
An accurate assessment, she argues, is one that weighs a young, fast-urbanising, increasingly educated population and proven projects like Glo-Djigbé alongside the risks that any market carries, rather than pricing an entire continent off a single, outdated story.
“I would like the fund manager to look at projects such as the Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone as evidence that African cotton can be processed sustainably in Africa into exportable garments at industrial scale,” she said — proof that the story is already changing, one factory at a time.
A continent coming into alignment
The continent’s most ambitious trade project, the African Continental Free Trade Area, drew a hopeful assessment. Its architecture, Doherty said, is “directionally aligned” with what a West African textile manufacturer needs — tariff schedules, rules of origin, and Afreximbank’s own cross-border payment system, PAPSS, are all pointed the right way.
The destination she describes is a striking one — cotton grown in one African country, spun and woven in a second, sold in a third, with predictable rules and frictionless payments throughout. It does not yet exist at scale. But in this conversation, it did not feel like aspiration. It felt like a schedule.
Benin’s twenty thousand new jobs, its rising share of processed cotton, its garments now hanging in European stores — these are not yet the full story of African industrialisation. But they are, Doherty insists, the proof that the story is real, that it is replicable, and that the only question that remains is speed.
About Ms. Oluranti Doherty
Ms. Oluranti Doherty is Managing Director for Export Development at Afreximbank, where she oversees export financing across manufacturing, agro-processing, extractives, and industrial parks and special economic zones. She brings more than twenty years in project finance, credit analysis and industrial policy advisory. Recent transactions include a $1 billion project-preparation facility with Shelter Afrique and a $15 million SME finance facility for Zimbabwean export value chains. She is a Fellow of ICAN, and studied at IMD Lausanne, the University of Leicester and Olabisi Onabanjo University.
