HUNDREDS of bright blue T-shirts with the slogan “smile” pass down a row of tables where they are inspected, folded, bagged and tagged. From here they will embark on an arduous journey of more than 1,000km (600 miles). A lorry will haul them from Kampala, Uganda’s capital, across Kenya to the port of Mombasa. A week later they will be loaded onto a ship for Hamburg, Germany. There they will be sold for €10 ($11) each by Bonprix, part of a family-owned mail-order firm with sales of $13bn a year.
These shirts began as cotton bolls in fields on the equator in the far west of Uganda, where the red-earth plains turn upwards into the Rwenzori mountains. Their odyssey reveals much about Africa’s manufacturing potential. By following in the footsteps of China and Bangladesh, which began their industrial revolutions with textiles, Africa could in theory create millions of jobs. But as the T-shirts’ travels also illustrate, it will not be easy.
Several African countries have tried in the past to become tailors and cloth-makers to the world. Nigeria’s northern cities of Kaduna and Kano were once home to textile mills that employed 350,000 people. Yet these...Continue reading
Source: Middle East and Africa http://ift.tt/2p9W3cx
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