Africa, Glob­al Value Chains and De­vel­op­ment

Course content

Technological and organizational changes have been crucial in transforming the way in which production is organized across time and space. The steam engine in the 19th century made transportation and manufacturing economic in ways that allowed the spatial separation of production from consumption, but for much of the 20th century, production was still organized along vertically integrated firms. By the late 1970s, however, a more flexible and spatially dispersed mode of production had taken hold – based on slicing up production in specific tasks and moving some of these out of the boundary of the firm through external contracting. Information and communication technology in the latter part of the 20th century further facilitated the global outsourcing and offshoring of manufacturing activity. This has led to the organization of economic activity in Global Value Chains (GVCs) that are dispersed globally but governed centrally by ‘lead firms’. Lead firms are groups of firms that operate at particular functional positions along the chain and that are able to shape who does what along the chain, at what price, using what standards, to which specifications, and delivering at what point in time.

These trends have important implications on economic, social and environmental trajectories in Africa and elsewhere, and on the kinds of interventions that are part of the current portfolio of development interventions. Participation in different kinds of global value chains has specific impacts on different kinds of actors, industries and countries. And different kinds of participation (or exclusion, non-participation) in GVCs also have different impacts, which need to be understood so to avoid a ‘one size fits all’ understanding of development trajectories and industrial policy in various African contexts.

In this course, we unpack this complexity in order to understand the changing role of Africa in the global economy, the kind of future trajectories we are likely to experience, and the potential, limits and effects of different kinds of value chain development interventions and industrial policy. Each session will include a lecture, group discussion, work on their papers, and/or hands-on work related to the theme of the session – this can include simulations, role-play and/or problem-solving exercises.