Why West Africa’s factories need more than power to compete

When policymakers across West Africa talk about closing the industrial gap with faster-growing emerging markets, the conversation almost always starts with electricity. Generation capacity, transmission losses, tariff reform, diesel costs, the usual litany. What rarely makes it into the policy brief is what happens once the lights come on.

Inside the region’s manufacturing plants, commercial buildings, and processing facilities, a quieter problem persists: the engineers tasked with running the equipment often lack the technical depth to run it well. That gap is becoming harder to ignore.

Electric motors are the workhorses of industrial production — powering pumps, compressors, conveyors, ventilation systems, and refrigeration units across virtually every sector.

According to the International Energy Agency’s Electric Motor Systems Platform, these machines account for roughly 53 percent of global electricity consumption and nearly 72 percent of electricity use within industrial environments.

How they are managed, configured, protected, monitored, optimised has a direct bearing on energy bills, equipment lifespan, and the frequency of costly downtime.
In much of West Africa, that management remains uneven.

“Industrial systems are becoming more connected, more data-driven, and more efficiency-focused,” said Ajibola Akindele, country president at Schneider Electric West Africa. “Developing local engineering capability is critical if West Africa wants to build industries that are competitive, resilient, and prepared for the future.”

Schneider Electric recently ran a programme it called the MoMARATHON, a training series focused on modern motor management and intelligent industrial operations. Engineers from manufacturing plants and facilities across the region were walked through motor protection principles, fault prevention, real-time diagnostics, system configuration, and the digital monitoring tools now standard in industrial settings elsewhere.

The programme is a small data point, but it points to something larger. Infrastructure investment — the grid expansions, the power purchase agreements, the industrial parks — creates the conditions for manufacturing growth. It does not, by itself, create the capability to sustain it. A poorly maintained motor system wastes energy, fails more frequently, and drives up operating costs in ways that erode the margin advantages manufacturers in the region are supposed to hold.

Nigeria’s National Industrial Policy has set a target of raising manufacturing’s share of GDP to between 20 percent and 25 percent by 2030. It currently sits below 10 percent. The distance between those numbers is not simply a function of infrastructure deficits or financing gaps, though both are real. It also reflects a shortage of engineers who can design, commission, and maintain the systems that efficient industrial production requires.

That shortage is not unique to Nigeria, nor to motors. It runs across industrial disciplines and shows up as avoidable downtime, premature equipment failure, and energy losses that compound across hundreds of facilities and hundreds of thousands of operating hours.

The timing of these capability gaps matters. Global electricity demand is expected to climb sharply in the years ahead, driven by artificial intelligence infrastructure, industrial digitisation, data centre expansion, and broader electrification. Efficiency gains at the equipment level, the kind that come from properly managed motor systems, will matter more, not less, as energy costs rise and industrial competition intensifies.

For manufacturers in West Africa, competing in that environment requires more than access to power. It requires the technical workforce to use it well. Training programmes address one slice of that challenge. Building the institutional pipelines, the technical schools, the apprenticeship frameworks, the industry-academic links, that make such capability self-sustaining is the harder, longer work still ahead.

The region’s industrial expansion is real, and the momentum behind it is genuine. But the factories that will define the next phase of West African manufacturing will not be won on infrastructure alone. They will be won, or lost, on what happens inside them.