By By: Ntombi Mhlongo
The Kingdom of Eswatini has been listed in the top six African countries that have industrialized in the past decade.
According to a new report issued by the African Development Bank (AfDB), 37 of 52 African countries have become more industrialized over the past eleven years, according to a new report from the African Development Bank, the African Union, and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO).
The Africa Industrialization Index (AII) report provides a country-level assessment of 52 African countries’ progress across 19 key indicators. The report will enable African governments to identify comparator countries to benchmark their own industrial performance and identify best practices more effectively.
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. The Index’s 19 indicators cover manufacturing performance, capital, labor, business environment, infrastructure, and macroeconomic stability.
The index also ranks African countries’ industrialization across three dimensions: performance, direct determinants, and indirect determinants. Direct determinants include such endowments as capital and labor and how these are deployed to drive industrial development. Indirect determinants include enabling environmental conditions such as macroeconomic stability, sound institutions, and infrastructure.
South Africa maintained a very high ranking throughout the 2010-2021 period, followed closely by Morocco, which held second place as of 2022. Rounding out the top six over the period are Egypt, Tunisia, Mauritius, and Eswatini. Abdu Mukhtar, African Development Bank Director for Industrial and Trade Development, represented the institution at the launch event.
He said that while Africa had shown encouraging progress in industrialization over the 2010-2022 period, the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had set back its efforts and highlighted gaps in production systems. “The continent has a unique opportunity to sort out this dependency by further integrating and conquering its own emerging markets.”
He added: “The African Continental Free Trade Area is creating a once-in-a-lifetime single market opportunity of 1.3 billion people and total aggregate consumer and business spending of up to $4 trillion creates an opportunity to enhance their trade and production linkages and finally reap industrial competitiveness from regional integration as other regions have done.”
