Browsing: Value addition

• Africa’s agribusiness sector is undergoing significant transformations driven by population growth, urbanisation, technological advancements, and shifting consumer preferences.
• Alongside their role in stimulating economic growth, agribusiness and agro-industrial development have the potential to reduce poverty and foster social and economic growth. 
• Technological advancements and digital transformations are revolutionising agribusiness in Africa, offering transformative opportunities.

Africa’s agribusiness sector potential

Agribusiness in Africa is undergoing significant transformations driven by population growth, urbanisation, technological advancements, and shifting consumer preferences. As a continent with abundant agricultural resources, Africa holds immense potential for agribusiness development.

African economic growth remains commodity-based, mainly on commodity exports, with minimal processing and value addition involved. To foster sustainable and inclusive growth and development in Africa, there is an urgent need to promote a new development approach based on exploiting the continent’s full agribusiness potential.

Some pressing issues call for a reorientation to support agribusiness and agro-industrial development, namely, poverty …

A report published by Lexology on January 18, 2022, Zimbabwe’s economy is largely driven by the mining, agriculture, and tourism sectors. However, because of Zimbabwe’s foreign currency shortages, there is a significant focus on export-oriented and foreign currency-generating activities.

This allows investors, businesses, and the government to retain value and meet the country’s forex needs. Zimbabwe’s main exports are minerals, agricultural produce, and soft commodities. She also has large reserves of chromite, coal, gold, and iron ore, among others. The country is also one of the world’s largest growers of tobacco.

According to research by Mordor Intelligence, Zimbabwe is a signatory of several bilateral and international agreements (MIGA, OPIC, ICSID, and UNCITRAL) that protect the investments of the companies in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has cheap educated, and competitive labour, well-developed infrastructure, and easy access to regional and global markets through its membership in AU, COMESA, SADC, COPAC, and CISSA. Zimbabwe offers …

The African economies are not diverse enough to help them navigate tough times like the one posed by the covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

This means that when the sectors that are popular in these economies are hit, the countries suffer immensely and take longer to recover. This is no different now and with projections that the economies will slow to about 2 per cent growth continent-wide.

Despite Africa’s immense wealth of natural resources and human capital, limitations still remain since the countries have no capacity to add value to these resources. For instance, Africa should be producing steel but it does not since it has to export the raw materials to be processed elsewhere denying the continent the much-needed revenues.

Why Central Africa is dragging Africa’s growth

Speaking in Kigali, Rwanda last December, the African Union Infrastructure Envoy Raila Odinga said that Africa needs to go beyond just producing the raw …

The Belt and Road Initiative is a China-led strategy to strengthen global trade links across the world, in particular between Asia, Africa and Europe…