KIGALI — Industry leaders, policymakers, and investors converged at the Kigali Convention Centre on Tuesday for the Textile and Garment CEO Forum, reaffirming Rwanda’s commitment to building its apparel and textile sector into a genuine driver of industrial transformation, job creation, and export growth.
The high-level forum brought together stakeholders from across the value chain to align on strategies for scaling both upstream textile production and downstream garment manufacturing. Discussions centred on leveraging Rwanda’s investments in the Kigali Special Economic Zone, its preferential market access under the African Continental Free Trade Area, and the policy environment created by the ban on second-hand clothing imports — a decision that cost Rwanda its AGOA access to the United States but that the government has described as a deliberate long-term industrial policy trade-off.
The Strategic Case
Rwanda Development Board CEO Jean-Guy K. Afrika opened proceedings by framing the forum as more than a sectoral conversation. The textile and garment industry, he said, sits at the intersection of several of Rwanda’s core development priorities: industrialisation, employment at scale, gender inclusion, and non-traditional export growth.
This sector is a key pillar of Rwanda’s industrialisation agenda, with the capacity for large-scale job creation, particularly for women and youth. We have a clear opportunity to expand local production, increase exports, and further position Rwanda in regional and global value chains. Jean-Guy K. Afrika · CEO, Rwanda Development Board · Textile and Garment CEO Forum, Kigali
Afrika pointed to the untapped opportunity within the industry, noting the structural gap between domestic demand and local supply. Rwanda currently imports almost all of its clothing. Closing that gap, even partially, would represent a significant shift in the country’s manufacturing base.
Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente set the national target plainly when addressing parliament in March 2025: clothe 100 percent of Rwandans with locally made garments by 2029, under the National Strategy for Transformation. He added that the initiative could generate savings of between Rwf 17 billion and Rwf 20 billion for the country annually — money currently flowing out to import markets.
From Policy to Production: Where the Sector Stands
The numbers behind Rwanda’s textile ambition tell a story of genuine momentum that has not yet reached the scale it needs. Textile and leather output grew from Rwf 34 billion in 2017 to an estimated Rwf 154 billion in 2024, a nearly fivefold increase in seven years. Over the same period, export performance moved sharply: between 2018 and 2020 alone, the value of Rwanda’s textile and apparel exports grew by 83 percent — a figure that is especially striking because it occurred while the US was suspending Rwanda’s AGOA duty-free access.
Against Rwanda’s overall GDP of Rwf 23.3 trillion in 2025, the sector remains below one percent of the economy. The growth is real. The scale is not yet. But it is building on a foundation that most of Rwanda’s industrial sub-sectors do not have: functioning anchor factories, an established special economic zone, and a government that has shown it will hold the policy line even at significant trade cost.
The AGOA Decision and What It Signals
Rwanda’s suspension from the African Growth and Opportunity Act in 2018 is the most important context for understanding this sector’s trajectory. AGOA grants eligible sub-Saharan African countries duty-free access to the US market for over 6,000 products. Rwanda lost that access after imposing a ban on second-hand clothing imports — a ban designed to remove the cheapest import substitute and create room for domestic manufacturing to compete on price.
The US trade representative at the time estimated that Rwanda’s second-hand clothing exports to America were worth about $1.5 million — roughly 3 percent of total Rwandan exports to the US, which stood at $43.7 million in 2017. Rwanda chose to absorb that loss. Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda reversed course and reinstated their second-hand clothing markets under US pressure. Rwanda did not.
The Minister of Trade and Industry has since stated clearly that industrial policy takes precedence over AGOA opportunities. That is a significant statement from a small, trade-dependent economy. It is a bet that building a domestic industry is worth more in the long run than preserving preferential access to a market that imports second-hand goods in competition with local production. As AGOA faces renewal discussions ahead of its September 2025 expiration, Rwanda has signalled it will not reverse course to regain eligibility.
Who Is Building at the KSEZ
The Kigali Special Economic Zone in Gasabo District is the physical home of Rwanda’s textile ambitions. It offers infrastructure difficult to access elsewhere in the country — sewage treatment, fibre optic connectivity, reliable power, and a streamlined regulatory environment — and has anchored both of the sector’s major investors.
| Company | Entry | Workers | Export Markets | Key Detail |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| C&H Garments | 2014 | 1,400+ | Domestic, USA (Walmart, Target) | First modern garment factory in Rwanda. Founded by Ma Xiaomei. Produces police, military, school and immigration uniforms. |
| Pink Mango C&D | 2019 | Target: 7,500 | Belgium, Germany, UK, France, Spain, Czech Republic, Turkey | Training centre launched 2023 with GIZ support. 300 trainees across 4 cohorts — 70% women, 80% youth. Brand Asantii launched 2022. |
Pink Mango exports through Witt-Gruppe, part of Germany’s Otto Group — one of the world’s largest fashion and retail groups. That relationship gives Rwanda’s garment exports access to established European supply chains and retail networks that most African apparel manufacturers spend years trying to build. The Pink Mango training model grades workers from E to A++ level and raises salaries progressively as skills advance. It is a practical answer to one of the sector’s persistent constraints: the shortage of workers with production-ready technical skills.
Pink Mango also launched Asantii in 2022 — a direct-to-consumer fashion brand that sources materials from within Africa and explicitly positions the continent as a location for premium garment production. It is one of the few attempts in the East African region to move up the value chain from contract manufacturing toward brand ownership.
The Domestic Gap and the 2029 Target
Local factories currently supply clothing for just 5 percent of Rwandans. The remaining 95 percent is imported. That gap is the central fact around which the entire sector strategy is built.
The government is using bulk procurement as a first lever to close that gap. Routing large public orders — including 200,000 school uniforms — to domestic factories creates guaranteed demand volume that allows unit production costs to fall. When factories run at or near capacity with predictable orders, they can negotiate better input prices, maintain equipment more reliably, and invest more confidently in workforce training. Rwanda is not the first country to use state procurement as an industrial policy tool. It is a well-established mechanism. What matters is whether the volume scales fast enough to make a dent in the 95 percent import share.
Plugging into Africa’s Market
Rwanda’s access to the African Continental Free Trade Area is the external dimension of the textile push. AfCFTA creates a single continental market of more than 1.3 billion people with a combined GDP of $3.4 trillion, with significantly reduced tariffs across 54 signatory countries. For a landlocked economy of 14 million, regional market access is not optional — it is the only route to the scale needed to make an export-oriented garment sector viable.
Research from the International Growth Centre estimated that Rwandan exports to new AfCFTA preference partners could increase by 23 percent from baseline, rising to as much as 104 percent if broader trade facilitation measures reducing logistics costs are implemented. Textiles are explicitly named in Rwanda’s national AfCFTA implementation strategy among the priority export sectors.
The broader continental context reinforces the opportunity. Africa’s apparel market was valued at $70.6 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to $88.68 billion by 2029 at a 4 percent compound annual growth rate, driven by urbanisation, a rising middle class, and increasing intra-African demand. Global fashion supply chains are also undergoing a strategic reset — brands are diversifying away from single-country dependence on Asia, and Africa is positioned to capture part of that shift.
| Market | Status | Route |
|---|---|---|
| Belgium / Germany / UK | Active | Pink Mango via Witt-Gruppe / Otto Group |
| France / Spain / Czech Republic / Turkey | Active | KSEZ factory output |
| Rwanda (domestic) | Growing | School uniforms, bulk government procurement |
| East Africa (EAC) | Growing | AfCFTA access, proximity, EAC free movement |
| West Africa | Potential | AfCFTA access — logistics cost barrier remains |
| United States | Suspended | AGOA removed 2018 — industrial policy prioritised over reinstatement |
Jobs, Inclusion and the Social Case
Beyond exports and GDP, the textile sector carries a social and economic multiplier effect that most other manufacturing segments cannot match. Garment manufacturing is labour-intensive by design, and the workers it employs are disproportionately women. Rwanda’s NST2 targets the creation of 250,000 jobs annually across the economy. The textile sector is expected to be a meaningful contributor.
The African Development Bank has noted that textile and clothing industries can drive Africa’s industrialisation while specifically benefitting women — who make up the majority of garment factory workers across the continent. For Rwanda, where gender economic inclusion is a stated policy priority, the sector alignment is direct.
The sector also creates jobs that are geographically accessible. Unlike mining, which concentrates employment in specific resource zones, garment factories can be located near population centres. The KSEZ is close to Kigali and accessible to workers from surrounding districts. As capacity expands beyond the economic zone into secondary cities, that geographic reach widens.
Afrika put it plainly at the forum: if Rwanda gets this right, the sector can transform livelihoods — not just balance sheets.
The Constraints Policymakers Are Racing Against
Two constraints dominate every honest discussion of this sector: production cost and raw material supply. They are connected, and both are hard.
Rwanda’s locally made garments are currently more expensive than imports. That price gap is partly a volume problem — factories not yet running at scales where unit costs fall to competitive levels — and partly a structural problem. Almost all the fabric used by Rwanda’s garment factories is imported. That means every piece of clothing made in Rwanda carries embedded foreign exchange exposure and is dependent on global supply chains that Rwanda cannot control.
MP Christine Mukabunani put the raw material question to the Prime Minister directly during the parliamentary session: by 2029, will Rwanda have enough local raw materials? Ngirente acknowledged the dependence on imported fabrics and committed to launching a new programme to boost local fabric production. The Bugesera tannery park, currently under development, is one adjacent project that speaks to the broader ambition of building a leather value chain alongside textiles.
It is worth noting that East Africa has a comparative advantage in textiles that it has not yet fully exploited. Unlike Bangladesh, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia — all dominant garment exporters — East Africa grows cotton. The raw material is present. The gap is in processing: converting cotton lint into finished fabric requires spinning and weaving capacity that the region has not yet built at scale. Rwanda sits within that regional context, and building local fabric supply is not a Rwanda-only project. It is an East African supply chain development challenge.
On skills, the Pink Mango training centre model provides a partial answer for one factory. Consumer surveys cited by Invest for Jobs found that Rwandans are willing to buy locally made garments but are put off by higher costs and concerns about product quality consistency. Solving the quality perception gap requires consistent production standards across the sector, not just at one facility.
The Regional Comparison
Rwanda is not alone in making this bet. Kenya exports garments at monthly values exceeding Sh4.5 billion, benefitting from AGOA access to manufacture for brands including H&M, Calvin Klein, Levi’s, and others. Ethiopia attracted PVH, Calvin Klein, and Tommy Hilfiger before political instability disrupted its trajectory. Egypt’s ready-made garment exports hit $1.94 billion in just the first seven months of 2025, up 26 percent year on year, supported by new textile cities in Fayoum and Minya.
What distinguishes Rwanda’s position in this competitive field is its regulatory stability and ease of doing business — Rwanda consistently ranks among the top two or three business environments on the continent — alongside the specific infrastructure at the KSEZ. What it lacks relative to Kenya and Ethiopia is the workforce scale and the longer industrial history. Building that takes time that the 2029 timeline does not generously allow.
CABN Analysis
The Textile and Garment CEO Forum is a useful moment of public alignment. It places the sector on record as a national priority, brings investors and policymakers into the same room, and generates commitments that can be tracked. What it does not do is solve the two hardest problems: raw materials and cost. Those require years of supply chain development, not a day of forum discussion.
Rwanda’s decision to hold the AGOA line — choosing industrial policy over preferential trade access — is the most important signal in this sector’s story. It tells investors that the government will not reverse course under external pressure. That predictability has value for factories making decade-long investment decisions. Pink Mango’s training centre, its brand launch, and its growing European buyer relationships are all consistent with a company that believes the Rwandan policy environment is stable enough to justify long-term commitment.
The raw material problem is the constraint that most determines whether this sector becomes durable or permanently dependent on subsidy. A garment industry that imports all its fabric is exposed to exchange rate risk, supply chain disruption, and the pricing power of foreign suppliers. Building local cotton processing and fabric production alongside factory capacity is slower and less photogenic than signing investment deals, but it is what separates countries with sustainable textile industries from those with assembly operations that relocate when labour costs rise.
The job creation numbers are where the strongest case lives. C&H and Pink Mango together employ or are targeting close to 9,000 workers, most of them women, many from rural backgrounds with no prior industrial experience. That is real and measurable. If the sector scales as the government intends, those numbers multiply. The social return on investment in this sector — per dollar of incentive or public procurement — is among the highest available in Rwanda’s manufacturing landscape. That is the argument that should drive the pace of policy execution, not just the export figures.
The Bottom Line
Rwanda’s textile push is not about competing with global manufacturing giants overnight. It is about converting a near-total import dependency into a domestic industry, generating industrial employment at scale in a sector that disproportionately employs women and youth, and building an export base that reduces dependence on commodity revenues. The output growth from 2017 to 2024 is real. The gap between current production and the 2029 target is also real. Rwanda has chosen industrial policy over short-term trade access and has the infrastructure, the anchor investors, and the policy coherence to make this work. Closing a 95-percentage-point supply gap in four years requires solving a raw material problem and a cost problem simultaneously — while keeping factories running and training programmes scaling. The question is not whether Rwanda should be doing this. The question is whether four years is long enough. Execution will answer it.
CABN Contributor 
CABN Staff Writer