A uranium project can lift export figures while its spending leaves the country. Tumas tests the alternative.
Section
Economics
Nine Deals, One Market: How China’s Zero-Tariff Terms Reshape Namibian Trade
Namibia signs nine agreements with Beijing and gains tariff-free entry. The harder question is what it now has to sell.
Chinese zones: A modest base for Africa’s export story
Chinese industrial zones are cast as engines of Africa’s export ambitions, but the recorded jobs and investment are modest, and the zones matter more as a template than a triumph.
Industrial parks: Value-chain infrastructure, or just serviced land
Industrial parks are sold as value-chain infrastructure, but a fenced plot with power and a road is only real estate until firms cluster and a supply chain forms inside it.
Trade fairs as pipelines: turning expo handshakes into SME orders
A four-day expo can announce billions in deals. The harder question is how many of those handshakes survive contact with shipping schedules, payment terms and a small firm’s first export.
Made in Africa, sold to China: why zero tariffs are only the doorway
China has thrown the door open to African goods. Walking through it with finished products, rather than raw ore, is the harder task that no tariff schedule can do for the continent.
China’s vanishing factory jobs: Africa’s chance, if it can catch them
The World Bank has floated 85 million manufacturing jobs leaving China as wages rise. Whether Africa captures a meaningful share is a question of readiness, not destiny.
Diamniadio: Senegal’s bet that a Chinese garment line can build an industry
Senegal spent about US$44m on a park outside Dakar and pinned 23,000 jobs on it. The first anchor tenant is a Chinese factory sewing T-shirts for the American market.
Huajian in Ethiopia: A Shoemaker as the Test Case for Industrial Linkage
A Chinese shoe firm exporting Ethiopian-made footwear to the US and Europe is the model linkage story – and the clearest evidence of how hard local sourcing actually is.