Minister Sanou,
I write to you not as a secretariat, but as a colleague — one of fifty-four ministers who signs the same painful cheque every year. Africa buys USD 709 bn of goods annually, and USD 620 bn of it leaves this continent. Some of that money is yours, some of it is mine, and almost none of it needs to go where it goes.
What is fixed — and what is yours to change
Two kinds of statement sit in this document, and they carry different weight. The continental spine is fixed: USD 709 bn of total imports; USD 620 bn sourced off-continent; approximately USD 89 bn traded within Africa; USD 136.75 bn of measured government procurement inside an estimated USD 207 bn that our governments influence. Those figures are measured, reconciled and not on the table. Everything else — the product bundle proposed for Mali — is Draft 1: a first pass drawn from your country’s productive-capacity audit, printed precisely so that you can correct it.
Why Mali is in this room
Mali's strongest endowment is cotton, and specifically ginned cotton lint with a pathway up into yarn. It is the one world-class endowment Mali already beneficiates domestically, at continental scale, through CMDT's 18 ginneries with combined capacity of around 4,300 tonnes a day, and it rests on institutional coordination rather than geological luck alone. Mali is perennially Africa's first or second cotton producer, and the continental substitution prize is well documented: African manufacturers source only 7% of their cotton yarn and 6% of their cotton fabric from within the continent, on ITC 2022 figures. The honest constraint is that this capability stops at lint. Roughly 1% of Malian cotton is processed into yarn or fabric, and moving further up the ladder is gated on a chronic power shortage of under 700 MW installed for some 22 million people, on landlocked transit through Dakar and Abidjan where regional logistics costs can reach 30% to 40% of goods value, and on corridor security. Mali's role in this bundle is as a raw-and-intermediate continental anchor, and it should be stated as such.
The instrument — two layers, both required
Pre-allocation. The African Union pre-allocates 25-year supply rights per product category to designated African producers. That is the fairness layer — the reason every member state, including those still rebuilding, holds a bundle at all.
Match-or-Release. When any of our governments procures, the designated continental supplier is shown the open-market quote and must match it on price, quality, warranty and service in a single window — or release the buyer instantly, no penalty, no delay. I have called it the Cell Phone Test: nobody in this room is asked to buy a worse phone. This is a right to match, never a right to exclude. Your procurement autonomy is untouched, and there is no pooled purchasing, no central buyer, no buyers’ club.
What I ask of you
One hour, and your pen. Mark what is wrong: the lines that do not belong to Mali, the capability this draft understates, the buyer it misreads. The response instrument at the end of this document takes a minute to complete, and Draft 2 will show, line by line, which member state asked for each change. Your correction is not an objection to the method — it is the method.