East Africa’s manufacturers hit by costs and imports

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• However, manufacturing has recently gone backwards in many African countries, as local producers such as Osembo face being overwhelmed by rising costs, infrastructure problems that hamper logistics, high energy prices, unreliable power grids, tax and customs burdens, as well as cheap Chinese imports.

• Osembo cites high import taxes on supplies, customs bureaucracy and supply chain disruption among reasons to move manufacturing to Asia: “I am such a big believer in development, but also from a practical perspective, I need to be able to plug in the global supply chains.”

• Rajan Shah, chair of the Kenya Association of Manufacturers and of Capwell Industries, a food processor, says that “low competitiveness, regulatory burden, and then tax unpredictability are probably the three major challenges”.

• In Kenya — despite the country’s reputation as a freewheeling business environment — manufacturing has struggled to sustain a transformative rate of growth. As a sector, its share of GDP almost halved from a peak of 13 per cent in 2007 to 7 per cent in 2021, according to the World Bank.