Africa - PACF

Following the regional conference in Bagamoyo in February last year, an action plan had been prepared and resulted now in a workshop for the national stakeholders, organized by the University of Dar es Salaam.

As a follow up of the TCI Conference on Innovative Clusters held in Gothenburg in September 2003, the three collaborating engineering faculties/college at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania (UDSM), Makerere University in Uganda and Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique organized a Regional Conference on Innovation Systems and Innovation Clusters in Eastern Africa, under the sponsorship of Sida/SAREC of Sweden.

The National Productivity and Competitiveness Council which has been spearheading the clustering concept in Mauritius welcomed government's incentives to transform the Mauritian Textile Industry through the promotion of a network of SMEs. To attain the competitiveness and flexibility of smaller manufacturers while maintaining the advantages of economies of scale, it is hoped that anchor firms will form that will be able to maintain financial stability and subcontract demands to the array of SMEs.

In 1995, the Le Maroc Competitif was launched in Morocco to develop a cluster-based approach for economic growth. In cooperation with the World Bank and an agreement with the European Union, Morocco identified four potential clusters to drive the economy: textiles and apparel, sea products, tourism, and electronic and information technology.