The AfCFTA Secretariat, in a recent report entitled The Futures Report 2021: Which Value Chains for a Made in Africa Revolution, identified certain industrial sectors and sub-sectors as potential candidates for value chain development under the AfCFTA agreement. The broad sectors included in their list were agricultural/agro-processing, textiles and leather, automotive, pharmaceuticals, mobile financial services and cultural industries.

This Trade Brief looks at the clothing, textile & leather sector (CT&L)^[1] in Africa, from the perspective of the regional and global value chain dimensions. The intention is to present the basic value chain metrics of the sector, including gender-disaggregated employment metrics, as a precursor to several more extensive studies forthcoming from tralac over the next few months.

^[1] The broadly defined CT&L sector in this context would include at least the following two digit HS codes: 42, 52, 61, 62, 63 and 64. If the narrative does not use the abbreviation ‘CT&L’ then a narrower definition is used, for example only clothing and textiles and excluding leather. This distinction is necessitated by data availability and aggregation issues across different data providers, as well as differences between trade-related sectoral classifications and those for industrial classification.
A detailed concordance, for the broad sectoral CT&L classification, between the trade classification (HS 2017) and industry-trade classification (SITC4) is given in the Appendix.

Readers are encouraged to quote and reproduce this material for educational, non-profit purposes, provided the source is acknowledged. All views and opinions expressed remain solely those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the views of tralac.