Packaging is playing an important role in the world.Flexible packaging does many things. But can it transform the future of some of Africa’s least-developed countries? Khalid Sheikh, chairman of Leicester-based Clifton Packaging, thinks so. What’s more, he’s on the verge of launching a project that, he believes, will put packaging at the heart of economic growth across the world’s poorest continent.


  This summer, if all goes according to plan, the first Centre of Excellence run by the ‘Buy African, Build Africa’ (BABA) scheme will open in Rwanda providing packaging services for local farmers and food producers. The concept, dreamt up by Sheikh two years ago, is simple: farmers will be able to bring their products, pay to have them packaged and then sell them for a far higher price than they are currently able to.

   Processing harvested food in this way may not sound like rocket science to us. But on a continent where, the World Bank estimates, agriculture represents 32% of GDP, yet around two-fifths of harvested food is lost because it is not stored or processed effectively, BABA could make the difference between profit and poverty.

   At the crux of the issue is the problem that the food that does make it to market is sold with zero added value. "99.3% of Rwandan coffee leaves the country as green coffee beans," says Sheikh. "They’re selling coffee beans for a pittance, and the value addition all takes place in the western world. If the growers were part of the value chain, handouts would become unnecessary."

Causing a stir
Backers of the scheme believe that BABA could be the catalyst for economic growth in the countries where it is introduced. As well as the benefits for farmers of being able to process food, better branding and packaging will encourage more exports of food to Europe and the US and, perhaps most importantly, help develop trade between African nations.

And many of those backers are among the most powerful players in African trade development. Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni visited Clifton Packaging’s Leicester facility last September to find out more about the project, and his country is now vying with four other nations – Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia and Kenya – to have the first BABA centre.

Meanwhile, COMESA – the trade bloc of 19 countries in eastern and southern Africa that stretches from Libya on the Mediterranean coast to Zimbabwe in the south of the continent – is playing a key role in developing the project.

Speaking to Packaging News, Sindiso Ngwenya, secretary general of COMESA, argues that BABA has come at the right time as it fits exactly into his organisation’s strategy of encouraging trade and investment, rather than foreign aid. Most of all, he wants Africa to move away from being a commodity provider in order to develop the continent’s economy, much as India and China have done already. BABA will, he says, be a key part of this.

"When you add value, this is where you generate employment and then support services for industries, so you move up the value chain," he says. "We look at branding and packaging as an integral part of that value chain. So BABA will contribute to the transformation and modernisation of the COMESA economy."

To back up his point, Ngwenya cites the example of pineapples, a key product for Uganda and a number of other countries. Raw, he says, they sell for ￡900 per tonne. If they are processed to make juice, the product will sell for ￡3,000 per tonne. Branded and packaged, the juice’s value jumps again to ￡5,000 per tonne. "Therein lies the value – around 40% to 60% of the value would lie within the BABA project. If you want to put money in the pockets of small-scale producers, that’s the best way of giving them a better price," he says.