Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Introduction

Africa’s textile and apparel industry does not suffer from a complete absence of market opportunity. African producers have access to regional markets through the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), while eligible countries have benefited from preferential access to the United States through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). The more difficult question is what happens between having that access and actually converting it into sustained commercial activity.

That question was at the centre of the Africa CTA Centre’s September virtual dialogue, “AGOA 2028: Turning Market Access into Competitive African Textile and Apparel Industries” The discussion brought together three complementary perspectives: what AGOA has actually delivered for African textile and apparel industrialisation; what African businesses need to become export-ready; and what is required to turn production capability into buyers, transactions, investment and repeat business.

The presentations exposed a gap that is often overlooked in discussions about African trade agreements: market access is only the beginning of the manufacturer’s journey. For a textile or apparel manufacturer, a trade preference is not experienced as a tariff schedule or a negotiated provision. It is experienced through much more practical questions which include:

• Can the factory source the required inputs? 
• Can it meet the buyer’s specifications? 
• Can it prove origin and compliance? 
• Can it produce consistently? 
• Can it price competitively after logistics and financing costs? 
• Can it deliver on time? 
• Can it find a buyer willing to place an order and, more importantly, place another one?

The experience of AGOA provides an important case study because it demonstrates both what preferential access can achieve and what it cannot achieve by itself.

AGOA Shows Both the Opportunity and the Limitation of Preferential Access

AGOA’s history offers a useful illustration of the difference between creating market opportunity and building industrial depth. The programme created significant opportunities for African apparel exporters to access the U.S. market. U.S. apparel imports from AGOA beneficiaries reached a historical peak of approximately $1.753 billion in 2004, fell to around $735 million in 2010, and recovered to approximately $1.425 billion in 2021. The trajectory was influenced not only by AGOA itself but also by wider changes in the global textile and apparel trading system, including the end of global textile quotas and the later removal of China safeguard quotas.

These gains were, however, not broadly distributed across the continent. According to Gamaleldin’s analysis, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Ethiopia and Mauritius together accounted for 95.3% of published 2021 AGOA apparel supplier value, while Kenya and Lesotho alone accounted for 52.1%. This concentration demonstrates that preferential access can generate significant export activity without necessarily producing a continent-wide transformation in textile and apparel manufacturing.

Gamaleldin’s presentation distinguished between the investment characteristics of apparel manufacturing and upstream textile production. Garment factories can be comparatively modular, use imported yarn and fabric, require less fixed investment and operate with shorter planning horizons. Spinning, weaving and processing, by contrast, involve heavier fixed assets, infrastructure and utility requirements, longer payback periods and greater exposure to policy uncertainty.

This helps explain why apparel export success does not automatically produce an integrated textile value chain. The Third-Country Fabric provision illustrates this tension particularly well. It enabled qualifying African apparel producers to use yarn and fabric sourced from outside the United States and the AGOA region, lowering the barrier to garment exports even where upstream African textile capacity was limited. The arrangement therefore made downstream apparel production more commercially accessible without requiring the upstream textile chain to be built first.

Gamaldein’s presentation concluded that AGOA worked more clearly as an apparel market-access mechanism than as a mechanism for automatically building an integrated African textile industry. The challenge for any future framework is therefore to connect market access with investment, regional value chains and greater industrial depth.

This is particularly important for AfCFTA. If African countries simply replace one external market with a larger continental market while retaining fragmented production systems, the scale of the market alone will not resolve the underlying industrial constraints. The question is whether regional market access can be used to connect complementary capabilities, stimulate investment and create stronger production networks.

Export Readiness: The Missing Layer Between Preference and Performance

If market access is only the starting point, what comes next? The presentation by D. Yvonne Rivers addressed this question directly by shifting attention from trade policy to export readiness. Her starting point was that an SME should assess its capabilities before spending heavily on production or shipping. The assessment covers product, capacity, quality, compliance, AGOA eligibility, pricing, logistics, finance, marketing, sales, documentation and scalability. The implication is important: an enterprise may have a potentially exportable product while still lacking the systems required to fulfil an international order.

Eligibility is not readiness: One of the most important distinctions in the presentation was between being located in an AGOA-eligible country and having an AGOA-ready product. An exporter needs to establish the relevant country eligibility, product classification, preference treatment, rules of origin, U.S. requirements and documentation before assuming that a shipment will qualify.

This is precisely where the manufacturer experiences the difference between a trade agreement and a usable trade opportunity. A preference that exists in legislation still requires a company to understand and satisfy the conditions attached to it.

Compliance becomes part of production: The same applies to compliance. Rivers’ presentation argues that compliance should be incorporated into product design, costing and buyer confidence, with exporters preparing evidence covering classification, origin, standards and testing, labelling, packaging, documentation, importer requirements and traceability.

For textile and apparel manufacturers, this is increasingly significant because access to international buyers depends not simply on whether a product can cross a border, but on whether the supplier can demonstrate that the product meets the buyer’s requirements.

Competitiveness is more than factory-gate cost: Export readiness also requires a different understanding of price. A manufacturer cannot determine export profitability by taking production cost and adding a margin. The relevant calculation includes inland transport, export documentation, customs and brokerage, packaging and labels, testing and certification, freight and insurance, warehousing, distributor or platform fees, marketing and returns.

This matters for AfCFTA as much as it does for AGOA. If a manufacturer can technically sell into another African market but the cost of moving the product, completing documentation, financing the transaction and managing border procedures makes the final price uncompetitive, then nominal market access has limited commercial value.

The same principle applies to logistics. Rivers’ framework calls for exporters to examine every handoff through the variables of cost, time and risk.

This is the missing layer between trade preference and commercial performance. A market can be open without a manufacturer being ready. And a manufacturer can be ready without yet being competitive. That is why the implementation of AGOA and AfCFTA needs to be considered not only in terms of whether African businesses can enter markets, but whether they have the practical conditions required to enter, compete, deliver and remain there.

From Export-Ready to Buyer-Ready

Export readiness is necessary, but it is not the same as having a market. A manufacturer can have a compliant product, production capacity and a competitive cost structure and still struggle to secure an international order. At some point, the question moves from “Can we export?” to “Who will buy from us, and why?”

This was an important shift in the presentation by Jako van Lill, whose focus was on connecting African capabilities to buyers, investment and repeatable commercial transactions. His starting point was that commercial opportunities can emerge in two ways. A business can begin with a clearly defined customer requirement and work backwards to build the necessary capability, or it can begin with an existing product, resource, technology or production advantage and identify the customer for whom that capability has value. Both approaches ultimately face the same test: does the customer value what the supplier can deliver? Manufacturers need to understand the customer, the product segment, the channel, the required specifications and the economics of the transaction before scaling production.

Rivers’ presentation makes a similar point from the SME perspective, exporters do not need to target an undefined “U.S. market.” They need to identify a particular customer, segment, channel and viable niche, validate demand and understand how frequently that customer may reorder. This is where the manufacturer moves from export readiness to buyer readiness.

The 5 Ps of the buyer proposition

Van Lill offers a practical framework for thinking about this through five dimensions: Product, Price, Place, Promotion and People.

The product must meet the required specification, quality, consistency and traceability requirements. Price must reflect the economics of the entire transaction nott just the factory selling price. Place concerns the ability to deliver the required volume, at the required time and with sufficient security of supply. Promotion establishes why a buyer should choose a particular supplier, while People addresses the skills, management, relationships and execution capability behind the business.

For African textile and apparel producers, the implications are significant. African origin, traceable raw materials, responsible production, local value addition and sustainability can all contribute to a compelling supplier proposition. But they cannot compensate for inconsistent quality or unreliable delivery. The commercial question therefore moves beyond ‘Why should a buyer choose us?’ and becomes ‘Why should the buyer choose us again?’

A first order demonstrates that market entry is possible. A repeat order demonstrates that the supplier has delivered sufficient value for the relationship to continue. For AGOA and AfCFTA, this suggests that trade policy should be connected more deliberately to the capabilities that allow firms to build repeat commercial relationships, rather than treating the first export transaction as the end point.

Trade Facilitation Must Be Designed Around the Transaction

Once a manufacturer has a product, a buyer and a regional or international market, another question becomes decisive: ‘Can the transaction actually work?’ This is where trade facilitation moves from being an institutional concept to a business reality.

A manufacturer encounters trade facilitation through customs procedures, documentation, border processes, logistics, duties, freight, insurance, payment terms and working-capital requirements. Each of these can affect whether an order is commercially viable.

Van Lill makes this point particularly clearly by arguing that a good product and a willing buyer do not automatically create a good transaction. The supplier must also account for production and processing costs, logistics, duties, insurance, working capital, trade finance, currency exposure, credit risk and potential claims. This is particularly important for manufacturers operating with limited working capital.

A buyer might offer a commercially attractive order but require payment after 60 or 90 days. The manufacturer still has to purchase inputs, pay workers, produce the goods, move the shipment and potentially wait for payment. The order may therefore be profitable on paper but impossible to execute without appropriate financing. This is why working capital and trade finance can not be separated from competitiveness. The same principle applies to logistics. An exporter needs to know whether goods can cross a border and how long the process takes, how predictable it is, what it costs and where the risks sit. Rivers’ export-readiness framework captures this through the simple variables of cost, time and risk at every stage of the supply chain.

For AfCFTA, this suggests that implementation should increasingly be evaluated from the perspective of the complete transaction. Can a manufacturer in one African country source fabric from another, process it in a third, manufacture garments in a fourth and deliver the finished product to a buyer in a fifth market without the accumulated administrative, logistical and financial costs destroying its competitiveness? If the answer is no, then tariff preferences alone cannot solve the problem.

Trade facilitation must therefore be understood as part of industrial policy. The manufacturer needs an environment where borders are predictable, documentation is manageable, origin can be demonstrated, logistics are reliable and the financial system can support the cash cycle associated with international trade.

This is also where digital trade infrastructure and market intelligence can become important. Industry bodies and commercial platforms can help connect suppliers and buyers, while governments can focus on enabling infrastructure, trade facilitation and the broader investment environment. Van Lill describes these roles as complementary: government enables, industry bodies organise and position, and commercial platforms connect buyers and suppliers.

The ultimate objective is to reduce the friction between a capable African manufacturer and a willing buyer, thereby turning formal market access into an actual transaction.

Investment Will Follow Commercial Credibility

The final link in this chain is investment. Africa’s textile industry requires investment in machinery, processing facilities, energy, logistics, skills, technology and production capacity. But investment does not occur simply because a market exists. The presentations suggest that investors need to see evidence that the complete commercial proposition can work.

This is particularly relevant to the upstream textile industries highlighted by Gamaleldin. Spinning, weaving and processing require heavier fixed assets, substantial infrastructure and longer planning horizons than many garment operations. Investors therefore need greater confidence that the market, policy environment and supply chain can support those investments over time.

Van Lill approaches the same problem from the commercial side. His argument is that Africa should not begin by the need to attract investment, but also focus on identifying the value propositions for investors to invest in. A credible investment proposition requires the right product, workable economics, reliable supply chains, capable people, buyers, working capital and repeat demand. An offtake agreement can help demonstrate that a market exists, but it cannot compensate for a value chain that is unable to deliver.

That does not mean investment should wait until every element is already perfect. Rather, it means that investment needs to be connected to credible market demand and a functioning value chain. This is particularly important for the African textile sector because the objective is to build factories that can operate competitively and remain commercially viable.

That requires attention to what happens around the factory: where the raw materials come from, how inputs move across borders, how products reach buyers, how orders are financed, how quality is maintained and whether customers return. It also changes how industrial success should be measured.

Gamaleldin’s presentation argues that African industrial growth should be assessed not only by what the continent exports, but by what it actually builds in terms of investment, local value, technology, skills and competitiveness. That is the deeper opportunity presented by the interaction between AGOA and AfCFTA.

AGOA can provide an external market opportunity. AfCFTA can potentially provide a regional market and sourcing platform. But neither becomes an industrialisation strategy until African businesses can convert those opportunities into commercially credible propositions that justify investment and support scale.

What Should AGOA and AfCFTA Actually Deliver for Manufacturers?

If the manufacturer is the point at which trade policy becomes a commercial reality, then the implementation of AGOA and AfCFTA should ultimately be judged by what changes at factory level. The question is not simply whether African businesses have preferential access to a market. It is whether they can use that access to source competitively, meet market requirements, secure buyers, complete transactions, receive payment, reinvest and grow.

The experience discussed during the webinar suggests several practical areas where implementation matters.

First, trade rules need to provide sufficient predictability for businesses to invest. Textile manufacturing is particularly sensitive to policy uncertainty because upstream investments in spinning, weaving, dyeing, finishing and processing require substantial fixed capital and longer planning horizons. Garment manufacturing can be relatively modular and more mobile, while upstream textile investment is considerably more infrastructure-intensive and difficult to relocate.

For manufacturers, therefore, the value of a trade preference is not only the tariff saving today. It is the confidence that the commercial conditions supporting an investment will remain sufficiently predictable for that investment to mature.

Second, implementation needs to address the gap between eligibility and readiness. A company can be located in an eligible country without being capable of supplying the U.S. market successfully. Export readiness involves product selection, production capacity, quality management, compliance, pricing, logistics, documentation, finance and the ability to scale. This means that trade-support programmes need to move beyond information about market access and help firms build the capabilities required to use it.

Third, regional trade policy needs to make it easier for African manufacturers to source from one another. If one country can provide cotton, another spinning capacity, another fabric production and another garment manufacturing, the commercial value of AfCFTA lies partly in making those connections function as one production system. That requires practical implementation of rules of origin, customs procedures, standards, logistics and trade facilitation.

Fourth, trade facilitation needs to be measured from the perspective of the transaction. A manufacturer does not experience trade facilitation as a policy document. It experiences it through the time required to clear goods, the cost of moving inputs across borders, documentation requirements, access to finance, insurance, currency exposure and the risks associated with delayed delivery or payment.

As Jako van Lill’s presentation emphasised, the economics of a transaction extend beyond the production cost to logistics, duties, insurance, working capital, trade finance, currency and credit risk.

Finally, implementation should help manufacturers move from isolated export transactions to sustained commercial relationships. The objective should be to develop businesses capable of winning repeat orders, building buyer confidence and reinvesting in productive capacity. That is where trade policy connects directly with industrial policy.

Reframing Success: From Market Access to Market Conversion

This leads to a broader question: how should Africa measure the success of AGOA and AfCFTA? Trade agreements naturally generate metrics around tariffs, trade values, export volumes, preference utilisation and the number of participating countries. These indicators remain important. But they do not fully capture what happens inside the productive economy.

The manufacturer experiences success differently. Success means being able to obtain the right inputs at competitive cost. It means producing to specification, meeting compliance requirements, delivering on time, receiving payment and securing the next order. It means having enough confidence in future demand to justify new machinery, additional workers, new processing capacity or deeper supplier relationships.

AGOA can provide access to an external market. AfCFTA can provide a continental market and a framework for regional production. But neither mechanism, by itself, guarantees that African manufacturers will become competitive. The missing element is conversion.

Market access must be converted into export readiness, export readiness into buyer confidence, buyer confidence into transactions, and transactions must become repeat business. Repeat business can then create the commercial case for investment, investment can deepen productive capacity, and productive capacity, when connected through regional value chains, can create greater industrial depth.

The resulting framework is therefore: Access → Readiness → Competitiveness → Transaction → Repeat Business → Investment → Industrial Depth

And this framework helps to determine how effectively African businesses convert market access into productive capacity and sustained commercial value. It shifts attention from the border to the factory, from tariff preferences to business capability, and from individual export shipments to the development of competitive production systems.

It also changes how the role of institutions is understood. Governments create the policy and investment environment. Trade institutions facilitate market access and information. Industry associations organise firms and build connections. Financial institutions address capital constraints. Buyers communicate specifications and demand. Manufacturers must ultimately deliver the product and sustain the commercial relationship.

Conclusion

AGOA and AfCFTA need to be understood as components of a broader pathway toward industrial competitiveness. AGOA can connect African producers to a major external market. AfCFTA can create opportunities for continental demand, regional sourcing and production specialisation. But the value of both ultimately depends on what African businesses are able to build around them.

The opportunity is to move beyond a model in which Africa participates in global textile and apparel trade primarily at the final assembly stage. The longer-term objective is deeper productive capability with stronger cotton-to-textile linkages, more spinning and weaving, processing and finishing capacity, competitive apparel manufacturing, regional supplier networks, skilled workers, reliable infrastructure, trade finance and commercially credible African suppliers.

That transformation will happen when market access is connected to readiness, competitiveness, transactions, repeat demand and investment.

This is also where AfCFTA can become particularly important. Its significance for the CTA sector lies in enabling African economies to produce together, linking complementary capabilities across borders so that the continent can offer buyers something individual factories and fragmented national markets often cannot provide on their own.

The manufacturer should therefore be placed at the centre of implementation. If trade policy makes it easier for that manufacturer to source, produce, comply, move, sell and reinvest, then trade agreements begin to generate industrial effects. If those connections remain fragmented, market access can exist without sufficient market conversion.

Ultimately, the factory is where trade policy becomes real. That is where preferential access becomes an order, or does not. That is where regional integration becomes a functioning supply chain or remains a policy ambition. And that is where export growth becomes industrial development or just another shipment.

For Africa’s CTA sector, the strategic task ahead is therefore how to build the productive and commercial capabilities required to convert access into lasting African value.