Heads of state back Clifton Packaging vision for African farmers

Comesa, the international trade bloc of 19 states in eastern and southern Africa, last week wrote Leicester-based Clifton Packaging’s Buy African, Build Africa project – known as BABA – into its constitution.

Following the decision, Clifton Packaging will now have access to money in a $3.8bn pot that the African Development Bank is planning to invest in the continent.

The decision to adopt the project and the BABA brand, which Packaging News first revealed in March, was taken at a Comesa summit meeting in Zimbabwe earlier this month.

Khalid Sheikh, the chairman of Clifton Packaging who invented the BABA concept, spoke at the summit’s Council of Ministers and won the support of key heads of state including Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and Zimbabwean prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai.

Sheikh told Packaging News: “It’s a dream come true. No private entrepreneur has ever spoken at the Council of Ministers before.

“Because we are in agriculture and also in food packaging, the African Development Bank is right behind the project. Money won’t be a problem.”

Around 32% of African GDP is generated by the agriculture sector, the World Bank estimates, yet almost two fifths of harvested is lost because it is not stored or processed effectively.

Under Sheikh’s plans, packaging ‘Centres of Excellence’ will offer Western-style packaging services to food producers, allowing them not only to cut food waste but also to create branded consumer products that will command higher value than the raw food currently does.

Sheikh, who is a Ugandan Asian, the community that was expelled from Uganda by dictator Idi Amin in the early 1970s, said that now the project has top-level approval, the next stage is to establish which countries will have the first centres.

“Everybody wants the first centre,” he said.

Packaging News produced a mini-magazine for the Comesa summit to explain the benefits of packaging and to support the BABA project. To obtain a PDF of the publication, email editor Josh Brooks at josh.brooks@haymarket.com

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