The Africa Food Systems Forum in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, has announced a "Deal Room" initiative specifically to drive new business deals and commitments by aiding companies in the agriculture and agribusiness sectors to access finance, mentorship, and market entry solutions to support their growth objectives.
It has called on governments in Africa to create legislative frameworks to encourage and protect the processing and agro-industrialisation of locally produced agricultural products, to enable countries to beneficiate their own agricultural products and export them.
At the launch the president of Tanzania’s MeTL Group of Companies, Mohammed Dewji, said too many African countries were missing out on opportunities to grow their production capacity with this situation.
He highlighted the anomaly that Tanzania was a major producer of cotton, but only had three textile firms.
“We are farming the cotton, ginning it, and exporting the same to China, where the final product is produced, dyed, and printed, and then it is sent back to us. Because of taxes involved at the local manufacturing level, we cannot compete," he said.
Swiss chocolate is made from cocoa from Ghana, and West African natural rubber comes back as rubber-based industrial goods.
Tanzania, Mozambique, and Ivory Coast are net exporters of cashew nuts but importers of roasted and processed cashew nuts, cashew butter, and other value-added cashew products, he added.
According to partner and investment director at Pearl Capital Partners in Uganda, Wanjohi Ndagu, African countries seem to implement policies that favour importation.
In Rwanda it was noted that to make the country attractive to investors, it had created a one-stop-centre where investors in any given sector, including agro-processing, are given services right from the search for a business name, business registration, generation of unique identification of the registered business and the opening of a business bank account to issuance of relevant permits and licences. This process takes a maximum of eight days for the business to become a legal entity.
During the event deputy administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, Isobel Coleman, announced an investment of $4 million (R76m) into the Deal Room. It will be channelled into VALUE4HER which is a continental initiative aimed at strengthening women's agribusiness enterprises.
