A ten-day trip to 2 countries – Zambia and Kenya in July 2023 recently brought a very different perspective of Africa. My first travel was in 1993-94 to Uganda & Kenya; then in gaps of a few years, I had been to Nigeria. A visit to Algeria in 2020 was the last time I visited the African sub-continent. The continent is full of great opportunities, and I believe the successful India story can inspire Africa for tomorrow.
The statement of Made In Zimbabwe during the meeting with the Empretec Director of Zimbabwe in 2019 at the Global Entrepreneurship Meeting in Bahrain struck a chord with me, and I found it very relevant and meaningful. It was in 2020 that I started working on Made In Africa theme, as I began to understand value chains, equitable distribution of income, and sustainable development from 2015 the time I was exposed to these terms in 2015 onwards as a beneficiary of UNIDO curated GCIP and UNCTAD’s Empretec program.
During the pandemic, participated in dialogues with Empretec centres in Gambia & Benin, once again giving insights which kept connecting to the narrative our honourable prime minister Narendra Modi has been promoting – Go Local, Vocal For Local, Atmanirbhar Bharat, Made In India, Make In India – a narrative which has inspired the nation towards the direction of localisation, looking within and national pride has evolved.
When Gyanendra Srivastava shared an opportunity to help one of the foundries in Zambia in auditing and assessing what it will take for them to become a Grade A foundry, I found this as an opportunity in disguise for continuing my active interest in working on localisation in Africa. The visit from 17th July to 25th July 2023 was very insightful, as I was looking at what I could give rather than take. A huge shift in the approach allowed me to observe things around me without bias or expectations.
7 days in Zambia, I could observe that while they had copper mines from which they were extracting copper, they were not doing any value addition to the same and were sending the same as an intermediate and then buying the same back as a finished product. The ecosystem for engineering manufacturing – capital goods, the foundry was not developed, and they highly depended on imports. The country is landlocked again, increasing the cost of procurement.
The trip to Kenya of 2 days once again had a similar situation; tea was cultivated, exported, processed outside and brought back to Kenya as one of the finest blended Kenyan teas. However, as I was informed, the value addition was not happening where the cultivation occurred. A similar discussion is ongoing in Zimbabwe on how to build the foundry industry with technical assistance from India; talks with students from Ethiopia and Mozambique who have interned with us at Rhino Machines provided with inputs that, yes, they wanted to do something back home.
All these discussions had one common thread; they looked at India with great respect for the way, post-colonization, India has come out from dependence to inter-dependence, reducing imports and partnering for localisation. India is an inspiration for African countries who have gained independence from a long reign of being ruled and colonized by majorly European countries. They may still be vulnerable to commercial colonization, which is happening, and do find the relevance of the model of India, which is open, where knowledge and information have been democratized, where there is freedom of enterprise and independence to craft one’s future, where there is hope if one is ready to work hard.
Made In Africa is a reality. India surely can be a ready, willing and able example and perhaps even partner with Africa in localisation and becoming Atmanirbhar Africa.