Between invention and industry: Africa’s missing middle
Africa does not lack ideas. It lacks the institutional machinery that turns them into industries. Closing that gap is the continent’s most consequential industrial challenge, writes Khalil Suleiman Halilu, Executive Vice Chairman and CEO, National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI), Nigeria.
Africa accounts for less than 2% of global manufacturing output. We hold 20% of the world’s land and 18% of its people. The gap between those numbers is the defining economic fact of our continent and even after decades of policy attention, it has barely moved.
The conventional explanations are infrastructure deficits, financing gaps fragmented markets – though countries with improving infrastructure still fail to industrialise. Capital continues to flow towards economies importing the goods their people consume, while skills programmes produce graduates with nowhere to apply what they have learned.
The diagnosis I want to offer is different. Africa’s industrialisation problem is not a shortage of ideas, talent, or ambition. It is a shortage of the connective tissue, the institutional machinery that converts knowledge and engineering capability into competitive industries.
Africa’s missing middle
Consider what happens across the continent every day. A researcher develops a promising technology but has no route to prototype it. A startup wins a competition but cannot access manufacturing infrastructure. A factory is commissioned but remains permanently dependent on imported components and expertise. A locally developed product works but finds no procurement, distribution, or capital willing to take it to scale. The individual pieces exist but the machinery that connects them is missing.
An innovation competition without an incubation pathway becomes an event. A research grant without commercialisation infrastructure ends with a paper. An industrial park without suppliers, engineers and markets becomes real estate.
Successful industrial economies are not collections of isolated assets. They are networks of capabilities where research institutions interact with manufacturers, manufacturers develop local suppliers and governments create early markets through intelligent procurement. The strength is in the connections.
At the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI) in Nigeria, this is how we now think about our mandate. Science and engineering are not ends in themselves, but are connected to production, enterprise and markets.
That means building the full chain. InnovateNaija identifies innovators across all 36 states. The NASENI Innovation Hub provides incubation and prototyping. Our Research Commercialisation Grant Programme has directed 229m naira ($173m) to researchers whose work has a path beyond the laboratory. NASENI HoldCo brings commercial discipline to viable enterprises. The Showroom makes production-ready technologies visible to buyers and investors.
On the manufacturing side, we are localising value chains rather than importing finished products. A 40-hectare Solar Industrial Park in Nasarawa state is being developed for solar manufacturing, not solar installation. Our Centre of Excellence produces precision components to aerospace tolerances – the category Nigerian manufacturers have long been forced to import. An ISO-certified diagnostics factory is producing medical test kits that Nigeria has historically imported.
None of these alone constitutes an industry. But when manufacturing capacity, component production, engineering capability, skills and markets begin reinforcing one another, an industrial ecosystem starts to emerge.
Government’s role here is specific and limited: solve coordination failures firms cannot solve alone, invest in shared infrastructure, de-risk strategic industries long enough for private capital to enter and then step back. A technology does not succeed because a government developed it. It succeeds when someone buys it repeatedly at a price that lets the producer survive.
Africa’s ambitions also require harder metrics. Memoranda signed do not constitute industrialisation. Are local supplier networks emerging? Is the share of locally produced inputs rising? Can an ecosystem survive a change of administration?
Africa needs projects that leave capabilities behind. We have the people, the ideas, the resources and increasingly the markets. What remains is to build the connections between them; from research to engineering, engineering to manufacturing, skills to industry, capital to enterprise and products to markets.
The missing middle can be built. But only deliberately and only by institutions willing to do unglamorous work over timescales that outlast political cycles. That is the industrial challenge of our generation. And there is no better moment to begin than now.
— Khalil Halilu is the Executive Vice Chairman/CEO of NASENI
