Abstract
Africa occupies a structurally paradoxical position in the global fashion economy: it produces roughly 6% of the world's cotton, yet an estimated 90% of that raw cotton leaves the continent unprocessed, returning as finished or semi-finished goods whose value is captured elsewhere. The continent's textile market has been valued at approximately USD 39 billion in 2025 with forecasts approaching USD 49 billion by 2030, yet garment factories run predominantly on imported fabric.
This paper argues that the missing layer in Africa's fashion industrialisation agenda is data provenance understood in its fullest sense: the authoritative, signed-at-source, tamper-evident record of what a material is, where events occurred, how it was produced and transformed, what knowledge informed the methods used, what technology enabled the transformation, who held custody, and who verified each claim.
The paper maps the information requirements of a nine-stage Global Fashion Value Chain for Africa — Soil/Origin → Production → Transformation → Manufacturing → Logistics → Market/Shelf → Use → Recovery → Regeneration — and proposes a layered provenance architecture organised around five dimensions: Place, Material, Method & Knowledge, Technology & Transformation, Custody & Verification, beneath a cross-cutting layer of Trust, Governance and Interoperability.
Throughout this paper, four categories of statement are distinguished: (1) established fact supported by authoritative evidence; (2) existing implementation or example demonstrated by another organisation; (3) research interpretation — the authors' analysis of what the evidence suggests; and (4) GFVC Africa's proposed architecture — what should be developed and tested.
Contents
- 1.Abstract
- 2.Introduction: The Information Problem in Africa's Fashion Value Chain
- 3.From Traceability to Data Provenance
- 4.From Soil to Shelf: Methods, Knowledge and Technologies Across the GFVC
- 5.Africa's Global Fashion Value Chain: Mapping the Information Requirements
- 6.The Provenance Gap: Five Structural Failures
- 7.The GFVC Africa Provenance Architecture
- 8.Data Governance and Trust
- 9.Digital Infrastructure and Interoperability
- 10.Applications for the African Fashion Value Chain Economy
- 11.Pilot Integration and Demonstration: Smart Textile Valley
- 12.Partnership and Research Agenda
- 13.Conclusion
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APA: Nkosi, N. (2026). Data provenance and the future of Africa's global fashion value chain: A framework for trusted, traceable and interoperable industrial systems (GFVC Africa Policy & Industrial Research Paper No. 001, Research-Enriched Edition). SMART GFVC Policy Centre, GFVC Africa Commission.
Contact: policycentre@gfvcafrica.org
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