Kenya and Uganda Have Stalled Cotton Sectors with Promising Potential

A shake-up in the upper ranks of the government of Kenya may be a good thing for the country’s textile sector, which various officials had been promising to revive but in which there had been few perceivable improvements since President William Ruto took office a year ago.

Ruto has named Rebecca Miano, a lawyer, as Kenya’s new minister of trade and investments, replacing Moses Kuria, who is now minister of public service performance and industry.

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While in his former cabinet post, Kuria had made a number of pronouncements about the textile industry which had been on the decline since its heyday in the 1980s. Both Kenya and Uganda, with which it shares a border, suffer from stalled growth in the cotton business and lagging garment production. Factories are idle yet consumer demand goes unmet. The government has appeared unfocused on textiles, despite the promise of aid and an abundance of goodwill coming from governments and NGOs.

Many promises of investment both foreign and domestic have been made over the past year, but few were realized. One of those was by the Kenyan government, claiming a renaissance in the cotton sector, which said in January and again in August that it would invest $1.6 million in new ginneries and reopening derelict garment factories.

Through Norfund, the Norwegian government announced in March that it was investing $14 million in a seven-year-old factory operated in Kenya by Hela Apparel Holdings, PLC, one of the firm’s largest and responsible for 20 percent of the country’s total export volume. In September, India-based Golkadas announced the purchase of Dubai-based Atraco, a producer of men’s, women’s and children’s private label apparel which has factories in Kenya.

Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni in September banned the import of used clothing which he claims is stifling growth in the country’s garment industry. There are dozens of factories in the works at the Mbale Industrial Park, including some devoted to textiles and apparel.

It will take more than platitudes to get the textile sector in either country up and running to where it should be, producing jobs and incomes for their impoverished populations.

Kenya is perhaps in the worse situation of the two. It has 52 textile spinning mills, but only 15 of them are operational.  According to the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research (KIPPR), weak labor productivity and low technology mean the mills that are operating are only doing so at 45 percent of capacity.

To meet domestic needs, Kenya imports some 93 percent of its textiles from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India and Pakistan. To curb that and perhaps pump some life into the sector locally, the government has proposed a 25 percent tariff on clothing imports, which Kuria said are luxuries Kenya cannot afford. Few think this will encourage consumers to buy locally, even at a steep 25 percent.

Some fear this will adversely affect the used clothing market, which thrives in Kenya as it did in Uganda before the ban, and which provides employment for some 3.4 million in the east African region.

Uganda, meanwhile, has a surfeit of cotton lint and exports 93 percent of it. Only about 10 percent of locally produced cotton is consumed within the country and a large chunk of that goes to the more than one million uniforms produced each year for school children.

Mali has the largest cotton yield of any African nation, producing some 760,000 tons annually. Uganda pales by comparison, with an annual production that hovers around 9,400 tons for 2022, a 36 percent increase from 2021 yet down from about 16,000 tons in the 1980s, a decade marked by political strife. That total had already declined by 5,000 tons in the decade previous, reports said.

According to Richard D. Mubiru, the chairman of the Uganda Manufacturers Association, part of the problem is the fact that production depends on 250,000 smallholder farmers which the government does little to support. As a result, he said, the industry has been left to ginners and cotton merchants who do little to improve it. In about 2001, Uganda had a plan to improve yield to about 185,000 tons by 2006, but it was never realized.

Last year, Kenya’s cotton crop produced 7,000 tons, down from 13,000 tons since the 1980s. According to Dr. Rose Ngugi of KIPPR, there are only 40,000 smallholder farmers operating in Kenya, down from 200,000 in the mid-1980s when Kenya’s textile industry was at its peak.

Despite its small size, which puts it on par with France as about equal to the U.S. state of Texas, Kenya has 170 large and medium apparel manufacturers that produce garments for export. About 70 percent of that goes to the U.S. where, like Uganda, they profit from duty free status offered by the African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA), which expires in 2025. So far, textile exports to the U.S. from Kenya under AGOA have totaled $403 million.

The textile sector in east Africa has a great deal of promise,  and might just turn the corner with the right influence behind it, said Prof. Patrick Diamond of Queen Mary University, London. He noted that the global transition from low cost ‘fast fashion’  to a circular production model is imperative and east Africa has the potential to take the lead.

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