Magadi soda could be a game changer for Kenya’s industrialisation

By Dr. Juma Mukhwana, CBS, PHD

We have dug it out. We have processed it to soda ash. We have put it on trains and trucks. We have transported it to Mombasa. And, overwhelmingly, we have shipped it overseas.

Other countries have then used our soda ash to manufacture glass, detergents, chemicals and numerous industrial products – creating factories, jobs, technology and wealth. Then, in some instances, Africa buys the finished products back.

That model must end

President William Ruto’s insistence that Kenya’s natural resources must support value addition, manufacturing and jobs at home represents an important turning point in our industrialisation journey.

The Government’s intervention at Magadi, and the President’s insistence that incoming investors should establish glass and chemical manufacturing facilities in Kenya, is bigger than Magadi. It raises one of the

most important economic questions facing Kenya and Africa today: Why should Africa continue exporting the building blocks of industrialisation instead of using them to industrialise?

We have exported jobs for too long

Soda ash is not an ordinary mineral. It is an industrial building block. It is a critical input in glass manufacturing and is also used in detergents, chemicals and numerous industrial processes.

For decades, the overwhelming majority of Magadi’s soda ash production has been exported to overseas markets, including the Indian subcontinent. Think about what that means. Kenya possesses the mineral.

Kenya bears the environmental footprint of extracting it. Kenyan infrastructure helps move it. Yet much of the downstream industrial value has historically been created elsewhere.

We have effectively been exporting not merely soda ash. We have been exporting potential factories, potential jobs, technology and opportunities for our engineers, chemists, technicians, transporters, entrepreneurs and young people.

President Ruto’s intervention therefore deserves support because it challenges a development model Africa has followed for far too long: dig it, ship it and buy it back. No continent industrialised that way. Africa cannot industrialise that way either.

From Magadi to an industrial ecosystem

The opportunity at Magadi is enormous. Instead of thinking of Magadi merely as a mining operation, we should begin thinking of it as the nucleus of a major Kenyan chemical and glass manufacturing ecosystem.

Imagine a large modern glass manufacturing complex supplied by Kenyan soda ash. Imagine Kenya manufacturing more of the glass required for buildings, windows, bottles, food and beverage packaging, pharmaceuticals, laboratories and other industries. Imagine chemical manufacturers locating close to the raw materials.

Around those anchor industries would emerge transport companies, packaging businesses, engineering firms, maintenance companies, laboratories, logistics providers, equipment suppliers and hundreds of SMEs.

That is how industrial clusters develop. One factory creates demand for another. One industry creates capabilities that attract another. One skilled worker trains another. One supplier becomes ten suppliers.

Soon, an area previously known principally for extracting a mineral becomes known for manufacturing products. That should be the future of Magadi. And it should become a model for Africa. Our minerals must become magnets for factories.

The Kenya-India trade relationship must also evolve

This discussion inevitably raises the question of Kenya’s economic relationship with India. Kenya and India are old friends. Our peoples have deep historical, cultural and commercial ties. Indian businesses have contributed significantly to Kenya’s economy, and there is substantial scope for our partnership to grow.

But friendship must also accommodate an honest conversation about trade. According to official Indian trade figures, bilateral merchandise trade reached approximately US$4.31 billion in the 2025/26 financial year.

India exported approximately US$4.01 billion worth of goods to Kenya, while importing only about US$290 million from Kenya.

For approximately every dollar India bought from Kenya, Kenya bought nearly 14 dollars from India.

That is an extraordinary imbalance. More importantly, the structure of this trade tells an even bigger story.

India sells Kenya petroleum products, pharmaceuticals, machinery, vehicles, electrical equipment, plastics, chemicals and other manufactured products. Kenya’s exports to India include tea, coffee, soda ash, vegetables, scrap metals and other largely primary or minimally processed products.

The pattern is familiar: Africa exports commodities. Asia exports manufactured products. That structure cannot remain the foundation of a 21st-century partnership. We must transform it.

India should manufacture more of what it sells to Kenya, in Kenya

Kenya does not seek to stop Indian companies from selling products to our market. Quite the opposite. We have, with a strong pharmaceutical base, skilled scientists, pharmacists, engineers and technicians, and access to the East African Community and the wider African Continental Free Trade Area.

Why should Kenya continue importing such a large proportion of pharmaceutical products from India when Indian pharmaceutical companies could establish manufacturing plants here? Let Indian companies manufacture medicines in Nairobi, Athi River, Naivasha, Kilifi, Mombasa, Kisumu and other emerging industrial centres, not simply for Kenya, but for East Africa and the African continent.

Kenya offers something extraordinarily valuable: a gateway to an African market of more than 1.4 billion people under the AfCFTA. The future Kenya-India relationship should therefore move beyond seller and buyer. It should become a relationship of co-investors, co-manufacturers and co-exporters.

Trade must be a two-way street

For Indian companies to succeed in Kenya. But increasingly, we should be asking them to make in Kenya what they sell in Kenya and Africa.

The pharmaceutical sector is an obvious starting point. India is one of the world’s pharmaceutical manufacturing powerhouses. Kenya, meanwhile, is East Africa’s leading industrial and commercial hub.

India must also do more to open its enormous market to Kenyan products. Kenyan tea should be more visible on Indian supermarket shelves. Our coffee should reach more Indian consumers. Our avocados, macadamia, horticultural products, leather products, textiles, manufactured goods and other value-added products should find a much larger market in India.

India cannot aspire to become one of Africa’s most important economic partners while viewing Africa primarily as a market for Indian manufactured goods and a source of raw materials. Partnership must mean mutual opportunity.

Kenya has demonstrated that it is prepared to negotiate ambitious economic arrangements with major global markets. We have an Economic Partnership Agreement with the European Union and an Economic Partnership Agreement with the United Kingdom. We have concluded a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with the United Arab Emirates. We have expanded market-access arrangements with China, while engagement with the United States is pursuing a more predictable reciprocal trade framework.

Kenya and India already have a trade agreement dating back to 1981, which provides Most Favored Nation treatment. But the world economy of 2026 bears little resemblance to that of 1981.

It is time for a modern Kenya-India Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement.

Such an agreement should not simply make it easier to move more Indian goods into Kenya. It must deliberately address the current imbalance. It should set measurable ambitions for increasing Kenyan exports to India, dismantle tariff and non-tariff barriers affecting Kenyan products, establish stronger mechanisms for mutual recognition of standards, promote technology transfer, and contain a serious investment and industrial cooperation framework.

That framework should encourage Indian manufacturers – particularly in pharmaceuticals, automotive components, electronics, textiles, chemicals, and machinery- to establish production facilities in Kenya. That is the economic partnership we should build.

Magadi should mark the end of an era

Magadi therefore represents something much bigger than soda ash. It represents a choice. For more than a century, Africa’s economic relationship with the world has been dominated by extraction.

We exported gold and imported jewellery. We exported cotton and imported clothes. We exported hides and skins and imported shoes. We exported crude petroleum and imported refined fuel. We exported minerals and imported machines. And at Magadi, we exported soda ash while importing enormous quantities of glass, chemicals, and other manufactured products.

Every time we export an unprocessed or insufficiently transformed resource that could competitively support manufacturing at home, we should ask ourselves: How many jobs are leaving the country with that ship?

How many factories? How much technology? How much tax revenue? How many opportunities for our young people?

President Ruto’s stand at Magadi should therefore become part of a broader African industrial doctrine: No strategic raw material should leave Africa without first asking whether we can competitively transform it here.

This does not mean shutting ourselves off from global trade. It means changing what we trade. We should export more glass instead of soda ash; more leather shoes instead of hides and skins; more textiles and garments instead of cotton lint; more processed foods instead of raw agricultural produce; more batteries and components instead of battery minerals; and more medicines instead of importing virtually everything from elsewhere.

Africa must graduate from being the world’s quarry and farm to becoming one of the world’s great workshops.

Our resources must build our industries

The industrialisation of Kenya will not happen through speeches alone. It will happen when we deliberately connect our natural resources to factories, skills, technology, infrastructure, investment and markets.

That is why the Magadi decision matters. Lake Magadi should not merely be a place where trains leave carrying soda ash towards ships at Mombasa. It should become one of the places where Kenya’s industrial future is built.

We should see furnaces. We should see glass factories. We should see chemical plants. We should see laboratories. We should see Kenyan engineers. We should see thousands of young people reporting to manufacturing jobs every morning.

And we should see trucks leaving Magadi not merely carrying a mineral, but carrying finished Kenyan productsdestined for Kampala, Kigali, Kinshasa, Lagos, Johannesburg, Dubai, London, Mumbai and

beyond.

That is industrialisation. That is value addition. That is economic sovereignty. And that is how a country

becomes prosperous.

President William Ruto is right to insist that Kenya’s natural resources must work harder for Kenyans. The

age of simply digging, loading and exporting must give way to an age of processing, manufacturing and exporting finished products.

And our message to our friends in India should be equally clear: We value our friendship. We welcome your investors. We welcome your technology. We welcome your entrepreneurs. But let us build a new economic relationship in which India does not merely sell to Kenya – India manufactures with Kenya; Kenya exports more to India; and together we manufacture for Africa and the world.

Magadi can be where that new chapter begins.

Kenya must manufacture. Africa must manufacture. Our resources must build our industries, our industries must create our jobs, and our jobs must create our prosperity.

Written by Dr. Juma Mukhwana, CBS, PHD, the Principal Secretary for Industrialization, Kenya.