Africa Imports 95% of Its Sports Gear. Afreximbank Wants to Change That — and Rugby Is the Opening Argument

On 22 June 2026, Herbert Mensah, President of Rugby Africa, will address a high-level panel at Afreximbank's 33rd Annual Meetings in El-Alamein, Egypt. The panel — "From Africa's Factories to the Pitch: Sports as a Conduit to Africa's Industrialisation" — sits within a broader conference theme of "Intra-African Trade and Industrialisation: Pathway to Economic Sovereignty." The invitation came from Prof. George Elombi, President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Afreximbank, a pan-African multilateral institution with over $40 billion in assets and a mandate to advance intra-African trade.

‍

The surface story is that a rugby administrator has been invited to a trade finance conference. The structural story is more significant. Afreximbank is arguing, through the architecture of its annual meetings, that sport is not a sideshow to African economic development but a potential anchor for an industrial base that the continent has consistently failed to build. The panel will examine how Africa's fast-growing sports and creative industries can generate demand for domestically manufactured goods — jerseys, balls, boots, stadium technologies, broadcasting equipment, fitness products, sports medicine supplies — rather than continuing to import them from manufacturers in Asia and Europe.

‍

The numbers frame the problem precisely. The global sports apparel market is currently valued at approximately $230 billion and is on a trajectory toward $325 billion by 2034. Africa's share of that market sits at roughly $30 billion — meaningful in absolute terms, but almost entirely composed of imported goods. The continent produces the consumers, the athletes, and increasingly the audiences. It does not produce the merchandise, the equipment, or the infrastructure. That gap is both an economic loss and a policy failure, and Afreximbank is naming it as such.

‍

Mensah is a credible voice for this argument. As President of Rugby Africa, he oversees a governing body of 40 member unions spanning the continent, including emerging rugby nations like Ghana, Nigeria, and Zambia — three of six countries identified by World Rugby as experiencing the fastest growth globally. He also serves as an Executive Board Member of World Rugby and Chairman of World Rugby Regions, giving him line-of-sight into how continental rugby associations in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Oceania have monetised their sports ecosystems. His argument in El-Alamein will presumably be that Africa has a growth asset — a sport expanding faster there than anywhere else in the world — and that the question is whether the continent captures the industrial value that growth creates, or exports that value to manufacturers elsewhere.

‍

What the panel will need to confront, beyond the aspirational framing, is the structural distance between a panel discussion and a functioning industrial policy. Africa's failure to build a domestic sports goods manufacturing sector is not primarily a question of will or even capital. It is a question of supply chain infrastructure, skills development, quality certification, distribution logistics, and the competitive cost structures of established Asian manufacturers who have invested decades in optimising for the global market. Capital from Afreximbank can help — the bank has the balance sheet to finance factory construction, equipment procurement, and working capital for manufacturers trying to enter the sports goods value chain. But financing alone cannot close a competitiveness gap that has been building for thirty years.

‍

The meeting itself will draw heads of state, central bank governors, finance ministers, and leaders of major financial institutions from Africa and the Caribbean. That concentration of decision-making authority in a single room is precisely the kind of forum where industrial policy commitments can be made — and where they can also be made and forgotten. The fact that Afreximbank is platforming sport as an economic argument rather than a cultural one is a meaningful shift in framing. Whether that framing translates into policy instruments — procurement mandates, tariff structures, financing facilities specifically targeted at sports goods manufacturers — will determine whether El-Alamein produces analysis or action.

‍

Rugby Africa's participation in an Afreximbank meeting is, in itself, a statement about how the continent's institutions are beginning to think about economic sovereignty. Sports governance and trade finance occupy different institutional worlds. The fact that they are sharing a panel stage in Egypt suggests that Africa's multilateral institutions are at least beginning to ask the right questions about where industrial value is created and where it should be retained. The answers — and the political will to act on them — are the harder part.