An 83-tailor cooperative from the African country created the company, the Kigali Garment Center, last year.
Located in a commercial domain built on one of the green hills surrounding the city, it was established in accordance with the Rwandan government’s strategy to energize the country’s clothing production sector.
“We have trained young people, 97% of them women, since the start of the plant,” says the company’s CEO and co-founder, Jerome Mugabo.
Behind him, on the factory grounds, employees, all of whom appear to be teenagers or 20-year-olds, make Chinese trousers.
Rwanda’s efforts to bring her domestic clothing industry to life have led her to pay for a lonely and ongoing industrial war with the United States dating back to 2015.
At that time, the six members of the East African Community (EAC) country bloc – Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda – announced that they would all introduce maximum price lists in the importation of used clothing. Or “chagua”.
The concept of the de facto ban was to prevent the importation of large quantities of reasonable used clothing, basically from the United States and the United Kingdom, which African countries say were slowing the expansion of their nascent apparel industries.
The scale of the challenge for the six countries is shown through widely reported 2015 figures through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID reported that in that year, CAD states accounted for approximately 13% ($274 million; 213 million pounds) of World Imports of Used Clothing.
They also found that nearly two-thirds of the combined population bought second-hand clothing.
In an effort to increase its share of these exports, the United States responded that the proposed ban would violate lax industrial agreements and threatened to remove CAO countries from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa).
Introduced in 2000, 39 countries in sub-Saharan Africa export thousands of duty-free products to the United States.
Following the announcement across the United States, all EAC members, with the exception of Rwanda, withdrew and then imposed a $4 tariff consistent with the kilogram on imports of used clothing in 2018. The United States responded by imposing 30% price lists in Rwanda. clothes, where there hadn’t been one before.
While Rwanda exported only about $1. 5 million a year in clothing to the United States at the time, it stopped it overnight and meant that the African country simply does not expect to build it.
However, Jerome Mugabo says he agrees with Rwanda’s resolve to approve it alone. “He helped us build our business because we have more consumers since the ban,” he says.
Ritesh Patel, managing director of Rwanda’s oldest clothing factory, Utexrwa, in 1984, agrees.
“Rwanda will have to do this to expand its economy,” he says. “Because other people can simply buy a used men’s blouse for 800 Rwandan francs [84 cents; 64 p], they were not interested in a new men’s blouse in Rwandan francs that we can produce. “
For years, Utexrwa had focused solely on the production of uniforms for police, businesses and schools, but since the ban on the importation of used clothing, it has spread to clothing, such as men’s shirts.
“It’s actually helping to avoid having to compete with a reasonable chagua, when we’re simultaneously witnessing a rapidly developing average elegance that will be able to produce “Made in Rwanda” products,” Patel adds.
However, where there are winners, there are also losers. ” Life has become very difficult,” says Rajabu Nzeyimana, who is at a wooden market table full of used underpants and a basket full of used socks.
The 42-year-old father has been promoting used garments for seven years, however, since 2018 he has been forced to start buying them at a much higher price from traders smuggling them out of the Congolese border of the city of Goma in Rwanda.
“My sales fell because I had to multiply my five times to make a living,” she says.
Mr. Nzeyimana adds that he is now suffering to pay his children’s dues.
Agoa’s withdrawal of clothing advertising also makes Rwanda less exciting as a production base for foreign clothing producers.
Chinese company C
Another Chinese clothing company in Rwanda: C products
These Chinese corporations are interested in opening factories in Africa, as labour prices are much lower than in China. What’s C doing now?
For the country’s clothing manufacturers, Rwanda’s government has abolished import taxes on raw fabrics such as cotton, and new factories obtain subsidies and loans.
Some experts, however, doubt that Rwanda will build a competitive garment industry. While Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Burundi are the main cotton producing countries, Rwanda wants to import this raw material, as the small state is not suitable. for primary cotton production, being a mountainous and incredibly densely populated country.
Water and electricity are also a matrix and road transport is incredibly bureaucratic and because Rwanda is a landlocked country.
The ban on used clothing also turns out to have a completely different effect, accidentally, as it pushes Rwandans to start buying new Chinese clothes imported at a low price.
“The government has waited until the country has built a mature textile industry before banning the chagua,” says clothing seller Felicien Maniraguha. It has gone from promoting imported used clothing to new imported Chinese clothing.
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Mr Maniraguha said that local clothing production was still too small and that the garments were elegant enough.
“Local garment factories are assembling boring clothes that look uniform lately,” says the 30-year-old.
Contrast this with Chinese-made jeans and floral T-shirts you’ve been selling lately.
“Rwandans prefer garments that look modern,” he says. I doubt that the local textile industry will ever produce beautiful and elegant garments that are more popular than reasonable Chinese imports. “