Mali: The Success Mali Must Move Beyond
Mali built a cotton sector capable of producing, ginning and exporting at scale. Mossadeck Bally argues that this success must now support a more demanding ambition: retain more fibre, begin with spinning and finance industry for the long term.
In Mali, cotton is everywhere except where its value multiplies. It supports between four and five million people and sustains transporters, banks, insurers and fuel distributors. The country has ranked among Africa’s leading producers for years. Yet, according to Mossadeck Bally, nearly 98 per cent of the fibre it produces still leaves the country without passing through a Malian spinning mill.
At first glance, this appears to be a story of industrial failure. Bally offers a more useful and more unsettling reading. The sector did not fail. It performed the mission for which it was designed: produce cotton fibre, gin it and export it. The problem is that Mali is now asking that architecture to accomplish a new mission without having built the ecosystem the new mission requires.
“We succeeded in making Mali one of Africa’s leading producers of cotton fibre. Now we need a vision of Mali as an industrial textile country.” — Mossadeck Bally
An agricultural success and an unfinished value chain
Bally speaks with the perspective of an entrepreneur who has invested across West Africa for nearly four decades. His diagnosis begins with history. Mali’s cotton sector was organised around farmer support and fibre exports. After independence, that orientation was consolidated with considerable success. Cotton became one of the country’s broadest sources of economic spillovers.
But producing fibre does not automatically lead to yarn, fabric and garments. The experiences of COMATEX, Fittina and ITEMA show why an isolated factory is not enough. Between a bale of cotton and a finished shirt stand reliable and competitively priced electricity, roads, technical skills, markets, guarantees and, above all, financing whose duration matches the life of the industrial asset.
Start with yarn
Bally is not proposing that Mali build an integrated industry overnight and attempt to compete with Asia at every stage. For a landlocked country located roughly 1,200 kilometres from some ports, sequencing matters. His first priority is spinning: convert fibre into yarn, even if the yarn must initially be exported.
The logic is industrial and logistical. Cotton fibre is bulky and flammable. Yarn is a higher-value product that is easier to transport and can attract textile manufacturers in a second phase. Once spinning capacity is established, Mali can progressively develop weaving and then garment production.
Public procurement can provide an initial market through military uniforms, school clothing and other government needs. Over time, Bally also sees scope for just-in-time production for Europe, using air freight when speed and proximity can offset some of the disadvantages of being landlocked.
“Instead of exporting cotton fibre, let us begin by exporting yarn. The yarn will then attract textile industries.” — Mossadeck Bally
When loan maturity programmes failure
The main barrier is not only the amount of capital. It is the form that capital takes. A spinning mill may require ten to fifteen years to amortise, while commercial banks rarely offer maturities beyond five to seven years. When repayment begins while a factory is still learning to produce efficiently, financing does not reduce risk; it organises failure.
Equity requirements create another barrier. For a textile plant costing CFAF 15 billion, Bally illustrates, a 30 per cent contribution represents CFAF 4.5 billion. Few entrepreneurs can immobilise that amount. When a project must raise US$20 million to US$50 million from a development finance institution, appraisal may take eighteen to twenty-four months—long enough to exhaust a promoter before the first machine turns.
Bally identifies four recurring disconnects between lenders and industrial operators: loan maturities that are too short; collateral requirements based on the promoter’s existing property rather than the future cash flows of the factory; lengthy appraisal processes; and a cost of credit incompatible with manufacturing margins. He adds a broader structural pressure: private borrowers can be crowded out when government securities offer banks attractive returns with fewer capital constraints.
“You have barely begun production when repayment starts. That means failure is guaranteed.” — Mossadeck Bally
Finance the project not only the promoter’s assets
The answer requires more deliberate financial engineering: first-loss guarantees, political-risk cover, equity investment and semi-concessional resources. Bally points to the World Bank’s Private Sector Window and to political-risk guarantees available through specialist institutions. These tools do not eliminate risk. They allocate it in a way that can make investment possible.
He also identifies Mali’s Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, once fully operational, as a potential source of long-term capital. Pension funds can play a similar role because their liabilities extend over ten, fifteen or twenty years—the same horizon industry needs. Bally argues that the Private Sector Guarantee Fund should be capitalised more strongly so an institutional guarantee can replace at least part of the land title or other fixed collateral demanded from entrepreneurs.
A strategic state and a private operator
For Bally, the model is not a state that owns and operates factories. It is a strategic state: one that defines the trajectory, secures land, organises infrastructure, simplifies tax and customs administration, and then attracts private capital and expertise through public-private partnerships.
The Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone in Benin is a reference point, but not a template to copy mechanically. Benin’s zone is close to a port; Mali must absorb the costs of being landlocked. A Malian textile zone would need to be designed around competitive energy, internal logistics, a single-window service and an initial specialisation in spinning.
Two public decisions recur in his argument. The first is a cotton single window bringing together government, power utilities, producers, investors, banks, development institutions and insurers. The second is a revised public-private partnership law that gives investors the stability and visibility required to commit capital for twenty or twenty-five years.
“The state must be strategic and visionary, but it must not be the operator.” — Mossadeck Bally
Risk viewed from a distance
Bally does not deny geopolitical tension or logistical constraints. He challenges the way those realities are converted into a risk premium. His experience across eight West African countries has taught him that external narratives often confuse difficulty with impossibility.
His message to investors is direct. Cotton responds to enduring global demand. Despite crises and disruptions to transport corridors, Mali continues to produce, gin and export. If that chain functions in a difficult environment, local transformation is not a fiction. Investors must visit, examine the assets, assess the operators and follow the real flows rather than stop at a general story about African risk.
“If you stop at what you see on television or hear on the radio, you will miss an opportunity.” — Mossadeck Bally
A vision measured over thirty years
The industrial ambition Bally describes cannot be reduced to a five-year campaign promise. It requires a measurable trajectory over several decades: progressively reduce the share of fibre exported, expand spinning capacity, use public procurement to establish an initial market, and then attract textile and garment production as the ecosystem gains competence.
A long horizon is not an argument for waiting. It is an argument for beginning now. Mali already has the raw material, organised producers, entrepreneurial experience and a regional market. The failures of earlier factories should be treated as evidence for better design, not as a verdict against industrialisation.
The first chapter of Mali’s cotton story was about volume. The next will be about value. The passage between them is not a leap but a sequence of concrete decisions: power, yarn, a guarantee, a law and a market. Bobbin by bobbin, the success of yesterday can become the industry of tomorrow.
“We must come together around a thirty- or forty-year vision: move from a producer and exporter of cotton fibre to a country industrialised around cotton.” — Mossadeck Bally
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