> If Africa doesn't need to get into the textile industry, that frees up labor and investment for more productive industries and everyone wins.

If you look at the development of East Asia (presumably the same elsewhere) post-WWII, the high-GDP societies have generally started at the bottom of the value chain and moved up and maybe out of manufacturing into services. Not many investors are going to, say, pour foreign capital and education investment into a society to develop, say, a finance industry or tech industry just because they have textile workers out of a job, even though those are among the most "productive" industries.

amusingly, north korea makes most of their clothes from polyvinyl formal because self-sufficiency for strategic geopolitical reasons (juche) is their official policy. historically, self-sufficiency in textiles for strategic geopolitical reasons (khadi) was a major pillar of gandhi's independence movement in india, because selling indian cotton back to india in the form of finished textiles was a major money pump from india back to england; khadi remains a prominent symbol of national pride and self-sufficiency today

africa of course is nothing like north korea or british-raj-era india, being an enormous, diverse continent rather than a country. it's more like europe, and as such is really at no risk of being non-self-sufficient in textiles. and giving a country free textiles is the opposite of forcing them to pay for imported textiles they can't afford

most of those textile are disposed, not donated. they are also not free. people buy it. there's a small ecosystem, the countries I've seen the locals but bulk textiles in a "Chinatown". most African countries lost their cotton export markets after end of slavery, ironically, because they never managed the investment for machines so the cotton fields just withered or were covered to something like corn with manual labor.

wonder why you think they are on Europe level situation. even further Yugoslavia post war was much better off

i don't mean africa is as rich as europe; i mean africa is larger and more diverse than europe, so analogizing africa to north korea is misleading

ah i see. but it's diverse in the sense that arbitrary lines were drawn by the invaders if we're taking about state economies. so more like Balkans for your meaning than Europe.

no, it's immensely more ethnically and culturally diverse than europe, regardless of where you draw the borders between states

Not sure if you're from the US but the government here (US) does plenty to protect American industries. I can't read the article, but whatever African countries they are talking about might have more economic strength if they don't have a hand-me-down textile industry.