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This summer, the chairman of Clifton Packaging will launch a project to provide packaging services to Rwandan farmers that he, and many others, believe could change Africa's fortunes. Josh Brooks reports.

Packaging does many things. But can it transform the future of some of Africa’s least-developed countries? Khalid Sheikh, chairman of Leicester-based Clifton Packaging, thinks so. What’s more, he’s on the verge of launching a project that, he believes, will put packaging at the heart of economic growth across the world’s poorest continent.

This summer, if all goes according to plan, the first Centre of Excellence run by the ‘Buy African, Build Africa’ (BABA) scheme will open in Rwanda providing packaging services for local farmers and food producers. The concept, dreamt up by Sheikh two years ago, is simple: farmers will be able to bring their products, pay to have them packaged and then sell them for a far higher price than they are currently able to.

Processing harvested food in this way may not sound like rocket science to us. But on a continent where, the World Bank estimates, agriculture represents 32% of GDP, yet around two-fifths of harvested food is lost because it is not stored or processed effectively, BABA could make the difference between profit and poverty.

At the crux of the issue is the problem that the food that does make it to market is sold with zero added value. "99.3% of Rwandan coffee leaves the country as green coffee beans," says Sheikh. "They’re selling coffee beans for a pittance, and the value addition all takes place in the western world. If the growers were part of the value chain, handouts would become unnecessary."

Causing a stir
Backers of the scheme believe that BABA could be the catalyst for economic growth in the countries where it is introduced. As well as the benefits for farmers of being able to process food, better branding and packaging will encourage more exports of food to Europe and the US and, perhaps most importantly, help develop trade between African nations.

And many of those backers are among the most powerful players in African trade development. Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni visited Clifton Packaging’s Leicester facility last September to find out more about the project, and his country is now vying with four other nations – Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia and Kenya – to have the first BABA centre.

Meanwhile, COMESA – the trade bloc of 19 countries in eastern and southern Africa that stretches from Libya on the Mediterranean coast to Zimbabwe in the south of the continent – is playing a key role in developing the project.

Speaking to Packaging News, Sindiso Ngwenya, secretary general of COMESA, argues that BABA has come at the right time as it fits exactly into his organisation’s strategy of encouraging trade and investment, rather than foreign aid. Most of all, he wants Africa to move away from being a commodity provider in order to develop the continent’s economy, much as India and China have done already. BABA will, he says, be a key part of this.

"When you add value, this is where you generate employment and then support services for industries, so you move up the value chain," he says. "We look at branding and packaging as an integral part of that value chain. So BABA will contribute to the transformation and modernisation of the COMESA economy."

To back up his point, Ngwenya cites the example of pineapples, a key product for Uganda and a number of other countries. Raw, he says, they sell for £900 per tonne. If they are processed to make juice, the product will sell for £3,000 per tonne. Branded and packaged, the juice’s value jumps again to £5,000 per tonne. "Therein lies the value – around 40% to 60% of the value would lie within the BABA project. If you want to put money in the pockets of small-scale producers, that’s the best way of giving them a better price," he says.



Ugandan origins
There are clearly big hopes for BABA. But as a project, it is just two years old. The idea for the scheme came in 2007, when Sheikh was invited to speak on agro-food processing and packaging for Africa at the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit in Uganda.

"As I started writing my speech, I just came up with this phrase ‘Buy African, Build Africa’. It started growing on me. The response I got to the first speech was unbelievable, and since then I’ve never looked back," he explains.

The invitation to speak at the event was, in large part, a result of the Sheikh family’s origins as Ugandan Asians. The family came to the UK in 1972 as refugees after the Asian community in the country was summarily expelled by the dictator Idi Amin. At the time, Khalid Sheikh was a teenager. Since then, he and his brothers have built Clifton Packaging into a mainstay of the Leicester economy and one of the bigger plastic packaging groups in the UK, supplying stand-up pouches, a range of film-based bags and packaging equipment. "We were refugees," he says. "So we thought why not go and put something positive back into Africa? Something that is real, where people can benefit and that is quantifiable."

The benefits would be as much for shoppers as anyone, Sheikh says. "There’s no packaging in Africa at all. You go into a shop and a staple product like cassava flour – similar to wheat flour here – is sold in 25kg sacks. But you don’t want 25kg, so you probably take a paper bag. If the same thing was packed in 1kg, 2kg packs, you’d have a consumer product that you could take home."

But despite the aim to help build Africa’s economy, BABA is no charity – its founder insists that it is a robust business model. Under the plans, Clifton will partner with both COMESA and the local governments to fund setting up the Centres of Excellence. Clifton will then supply the machinery and all the packaging materials to the centres, with all packaging produced at the same quality as in developed economies.

"It’s a packaging business, and a way for me to expand my company outside the UK," says Sheikh. "It’s going to be of a lot of benefit to our company." He adds that he is willing to talk to any packaging or machinery suppliers who think they could add something to the project that Clifton can’t supply itself, as that can only make the project "bigger and stronger".

However, where Sheikh believes the BABA project differs from other foreign investment programmes in Africa is in its emphasis on educating the local population to run the centres themselves, rather than spending millions on white elephant projects which fail quickly for a lack of skills.

Key to this is a virtual learning environment that will be incorporated into each centre, with computers linked up to the Clifton factory in Leicester delivering training on packaging, food hygiene, processing and so on. "We can deliver training programmes through the whole of Africa at any one time from our boardroom. So we’re providing not only the packaging but the knowledge transfer programme, the expertise so that they become independent," he says.

And start-up costs for farmers and other food producers will be minimal, Sheikh says. "In the first three months there will be so much packaging that it will become a landmark local brand, and for that we’re prepared to spend the money. No-one will stop after that."

How some of the least developed nations on earth react to the advent of packaging in their local stores remains to be seen. But for Khalid Sheikh, the result is a win both for his company and for the countries he is targeting. "It’s already a business," he says. "But in the long term I’ll look back and say this was the best thing I ever did for a continent that too often gets ignored."

For more information, visit www.babavision.com