By Terryanne Chebet
What to know
- West Africa grew 5% of the world’s cotton in 2025/26 but supplied 11% of its cotton exports.
- About 98% of the cotton from the region’s five biggest growers leaves as raw fibre.
- Africa spends about US$50 billion a year importing cotton products it could make itself, according to Afreximbank.
- In Benin, cotton that earned about US$40 million a year as fibre now earns about US$800 million as clothing.
West Africa punches above its weight in the cotton trade and far below it in the cotton industry. The region grew 5% of the world’s cotton in 2025/26, up from 4% a season earlier, according to the International Cotton Advisory Committee (ICAC). Yet it supplied 11% of global cotton exports, up from 9%. The arithmetic is simple. A region that exports more than twice its share of the world’s harvest is keeping almost none of that harvest for itself.
The detail confirms it. The World Trade Organization (WTO) said in March 2026 that about 98% of the cotton grown in Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali, the group known in trade talks as the C4+, leaves as raw fibre. Côte d’Ivoire harvested about 565,000 bales in 2025/26 and used 10,000 of them at home, according to the US Department of Agriculture. The rest was shipped abroad to be spun, woven and sewn by someone else.
What comes back costs far more. George Elombi, president of the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), told the WTO’s ministerial conference in Yaoundé in March that Africa spends about US$50 billion a year importing cotton products it could make itself. China alone shipped US$8.51 billion of clothing to the continent in 2025, up 15% in a single year, according to Chinese customs data. The fibre leaves Africa at the cheapest point in the chain and returns at the dearest.
The missing piece is the middle of the chain, where fibre becomes yarn and yarn becomes cloth. The world added plenty of that capacity in 2025, and Africa largely sat it out. The International Textile Manufacturers Federation (ITMF) reports that 6.11 million new short-staple spindles, the machines that spin cotton into yarn, were shipped worldwide last year. Asia and Oceania took 95% of them, and shipments to Africa fell by 46%. The same region took 95% of new weaving looms and 86% of new circular knitting machines. Cotton is spun where the spindles are.
Benin is the exception that makes the case. The country harvested 533,590 tonnes of cotton in 2025/26 and overtook Mali as the largest producer in the CFA franc zone, the group of African countries that share the CFA franc, according to the Regional Integrated Cotton Production Programme in Africa (PR-PICA). Mali’s crop fell by 39.5% and the zone’s total by about 14%, so Benin’s lead owes something to its neighbour’s bad year. Its more important gain is industrial. Afreximbank says Benin used to export 40,000 tonnes of raw cotton a year at US$1 to US$1.50 a kilogram, earning about US$40 million. Processed into garments at the Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone outside Cotonou, the same volume now brings in about US$800 million a year. That is twenty times the revenue from the same fibre, and it comes from only a fraction of Benin’s annual crop.
Few neighbours have followed, and cost is the main reason. Spinning, weaving and dyeing are energy-hungry, and a mill pays for its power around the clock. A regulatory audit published by the Kenya Association of Manufacturers in April 2026 put Kenya’s industrial electricity tariffs at 18 to 23 US cents per kilowatt-hour. The same audit put the figure at about 5 cents in Ethiopia and Morocco and 3 cents in Egypt and South Africa. A mill in Nairobi can pay six times as much for power as one in Cairo. Cheap labour cannot close a gap that size. Investors also weigh port efficiency, the cost of borrowing, the availability of local fabric and trims, and the supply of trained technicians. Countries that offer all of these together will win the factories, and those that offer only low wages will not.
The fibre itself is a growing asset. Cotton made in Africa is a sustainability label for cotton grown by small-scale African farmers, run by the Aid by Trade Foundation since 2006. Independent auditors check that the cotton was grown without child labour or forced labour, without the most hazardous pesticides, and on rain-fed land. In 2025 the standard verified 522,000 tonnes of lint, about 36% of the continent’s crop and up from about 33% in 2023/24, grown by 715,000 farmers in 10 countries. Global brands increasingly demand that kind of traceable supply, and European Union due-diligence rules and American bans on goods made with forced labour are making it harder to sell without it.
Access to rich markets is also more secure than it was a year ago. The United States extended the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which gives eligible African countries duty-free access to the American market, through December 2028, with President Donald Trump signing the extension on 4 September 2026. The European Union’s Everything But Arms scheme gives the poorest African countries duty-free, quota-free access to Europe, and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is building a single market at home.
Money is starting to follow. Afreximbank has set a target of US$10 billion of import substitution by 2030, meaning cotton goods Africa now buys abroad would be made on the continent, and expects its programme to support 500,000 jobs. It has committed US$2 billion to Nigeria’s cotton sector, and industrial zones modelled on Glo-Djigbé are under construction in Cameroon, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. Separately, the WTO, the UN Industrial Development Organization and the International Trade Centre are mobilising about US$5 billion over ten years to expand processing in the C4+ countries, which they estimate could create around 500,000 direct jobs. Governments are setting their own goals too. Mali said in October 2026 that it aims to process at least 10% of its cotton at home, although it has named neither a date nor a source of funding.
Mr Elombi predicts that within 15 to 20 years Africa will stop exporting raw cotton altogether and sell only textiles and clothing. He is also clear about what stands in the way. “This transformation is not driven by financing alone,” he said in April, “but by political will and effective public sector execution.” Africa does not need to choose between exporting cotton and building industry. It needs to connect the two, and Benin has shown the return when it does.
- West Africa’s share of world cotton exports is more than double its share of world production, because it keeps almost none of its crop.
- 95% of the new spinning spindles shipped in 2025 went to Asia and Oceania, and shipments to Africa fell 46%.
- Benin overtook Mali as the CFA zone’s largest grower and showed that processing can multiply cotton earnings twentyfold.
- More than a third of Africa’s cotton is independently verified, an asset brands and regulators increasingly demand.
- Afreximbank is targeting US$10 billion of import substitution and 500,000 jobs by 2030, alongside a US$5 billion WTO-backed processing drive.