Kenya is Serious About Rebuilding Cotton and Textile Sector, Official Says
Kenya’s cotton sector is undergoing a renaissance, according to Cabinet Secretary for Investments, Trade and Industry Moses Kuria.
The parliamentary official on Monday spoke to the Kenyan government’s commitment to revitalize the industry through a Cotton Revival and Implementation plan, which he believes will bolster the country’s textile sector.
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Kuria met with industry stakeholders at a conference in Uasin Gishu county, a western province that is home to a large commercial center in the town of Eldoret. The meeting’s attendees included members of the Kenyan government, including Principal Secretary for Industry Dr. Juma Mukhwana, along with governors from cotton-growing counties, members of the private sector and farmers, who discussed how to spur the growth of a national cotton industry in decline since the 1990s.
Kuria urged attendees to invest in rebuilding the cotton sector, and the textile industry at large, in order to take advantage of “quota free, duty free access to the U.S. market” through the AGOA treaty—a privilege that he said Kenya isn’t fully exploiting. He wants to see people in Kenya buy more from local businesses, instead of relying on secondhand garments from overseas. “Importing clothes should be a luxury, not a necessity,” he added. “We are dealing with a very serious issue here of fixing a broken system, a broken process and a broken social fabric.”
Research from Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA) released last month showed that the secondhand economy is responsible for flooding the country with hundreds of thousands of pounds of footwear and apparel from other markets. This has stunted the growth of local industry, including 170 apparel companies and 74,000 small and micro firms that are fighting to grow domestic business. The lack of demand has led to a dearth of locally grown raw materials. Just 40,000 farming operations remain active since the industry’s peak in the mid-1980s, when more than 200,000 mostly small-holder farms operated in Kenya.
“Our aim is to ensure that Kenya maximizes on the benefits of the whole value chain,” Kuria wrote in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, after Monday’s meeting. “The sector needs to advance and ensure that the locally manufactured clothes meet both quality and affordability to avoid dependence on imports.”
According to Kuria, the Kenyan government is now committed to ensuring that policies are in place to help revive the cotton sector, including implementing levies to encourage residents to support local apparel businesses. Educating farmers on global best practices for cotton seed development, capacity building and cotton aggregation, as well as promoting access to organic cotton and regenerative strains resistant to Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), will help revitalize the industry.
“Ginning is also a key focus,” Kuria wrote. “Thus the government is keen on setting up a ginnery for every qualifying county,” each of which would process up to 20,000 metric tons of cotton annually. Earlier this year, Principal Secretary Mukhwana announced that the Kenyan government would invest $1.6 million to open new ginneries and relaunch defunct garment factories. The County Aggregation and Industrial Parks (CAIPs) will make the cotton value chain, and the building of industrial capacity, a priority moving forward, Kuria added.