Building and rehabilitating critical capacities to exploit natural resources and diversify the economy in to processing and manufacturing in Zimbabwe

Abstract

The performance of African economies has steadily been on the decline. This decline is perhaps more rapid in the industrial sector where the share of manufacturing in the total regional GDP declined from 11.35 per cent in 1986 to an average 10.6 per cent during the period 1990 - 1992. The MVA at 1990 prices (as a percentage of GDP) for developing Africa has also declined from 12.1 in 1990 to 11.8 in 1993. It will be recalled that the Lima Declaration and Plan of Action on Industrial Development and Cooperation proclaimed in Lima, Peru in 1975, had called for 25 per cent of world industrial production to be located in the developing countries by the year 2000. This ambitious target looks more and more difficult to attain and it would appear that Africa will not even attain half of this target by the year 2000, unless a lot of effort is put into the mobilization of African capacities.