Africa-Press – Botswana. Thirty-seven of Africa’s 52 countries have become more industrialized over the past eleven years, according to a report recently released by the African Development Bank, African Union and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).
The Africa Industrialization Index (AII) Report provides a country-level assessment of the progress of 52 African countries across 19 key indicators.
The report will enable African governments to identify comparable countries to benchmark their own industrial performance and more effectively identify best practices.
The African Development Bank, the African Union and UNIDO jointly launched the inaugural edition of the AII on the sidelines of the African Union Summit on Industrialization and Economic Diversification in Niamey, Niger.
Evaluation of industrialization through various metrics. The Index’s 19 indicators cover the performance of manufacturing, capital, labor, the business environment, infrastructure and macroeconomic stability.
The index also ranks the industrialization of African countries along three dimensions: performance, direct determinants and indirect determinants. Direct determinants include endowments such as capital and labor and how these are used to drive industrial development. Indirect determinants include creating environmental conditions such as macroeconomic stability, sound institutions and infrastructure.
South Africa maintained a very high ranking over the period 2010-2021, closely followed by Morocco, which retained the second place in 2022. In the top six places over the period are Egypt, Tunisia, Mauritius, and iSwatini.
AfDB Director for Industrial and Commercial Development, Abdu Mukhtar, represented the institution at the launch event.
“While Africa has shown encouraging progress in industrialization during the period 2010-2022, the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have delayed its efforts and highlighted gaps in production systems; the continent has a unique opportunity to address this dependency through greater integration and conquest of their own emerging markets”, he said.
“The African Continental Free Trade Area is creating a unique single market opportunity of 1.3 billion people and an aggregate total of up to US$4 billion in consumer and business expenditures, which create an opportunity to improve their commercial and production links and finally take advantage of the industrial competitiveness that results from regional integration, as other regions have done”, he added.
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