Search Results for: South Africa

When Fatima Alaouia-Zohra stepped up to become the first female director-general of Morocco’s textile and clothing industry association AMITH last September (2019), she was ready to lead this important near-sourcing manufacturing hub through a process of massive change.

Little did she know that within months she would also be facing the gargantuan challenge of steering the industry through the Covid-19 global crisis, a pandemic that while hugely disruptive, creates opportunities for Moroccan clothing and textile makers.…

South Sudan is struggling to deliver a plan to reopen its higher education sector to face-to-face learning in September, which is attempting to shrug off Covid-19, just as the country is emerging from civil war. The latest push follows an abortive early attempt to pull South Sudan’s universities out of lockdown in May and comes as Gabriel Changson Chang as the new minister of higher education, science and technology – the third minister to hold that office since January 2020. …

A PLAN to build a dedicated hydrogen pipeline network of almost 23,000 km within nine European countries by 2040 has been released by 11 European gas infrastructure companies. Enagás, Energinet, Fluxys Belgium, Gasunie, GRTgaz, NET4GAS, OGE, ONTRAS, Snam, Swedegas (Nordion Energi), Teréga and a consultancy Guidehouse call their proposed network a ‘European Hydrogen Backbone’.…

The cutting edge IT field of quantum computing is developing across Africa, with South Africa considered the hub, in part through an IBM centre in Johannesburg that enables academics throughout the continent to freely access its quantum computer network, based in the USA, through the cloud.…

GRAPHENE, a form of carbon, formed into a single layer of atoms arranged in two-dimensional honeycomb lattice, has been hailed as a super-material – highly conductive (heat and power), strong, stable, and absorbent of light and liquid. It is the latter quality that has caught the eye of the petroleum sector, with graphene being used to help clean up oils spills.…

Innovation is a key to success in the knitwear sector, but when a manufacturing hub combines centuries-old traditions of knitted product production with new technology and ideas, that is a winning combination. This is the strength of Japan’s Wakayama knitwear manufacturing centre, located south of Osaka, on the western coast of the Kii Peninsula.…

VIETNAM clothing industry insiders have told just-style that they are optimistic that the Vietnamese apparel supply chain will emerge strengthened from the Covid-19 crisis in 2021. This is despite an ongoing shortage of orders during 2020, only partly mitigated by switching production to make masks.…

Indian apparel exporters continue to face severe labour shortages, limiting the orders they can accept and undermining the quality of their work, even as the country’s five months-long Covid-19 related lockdown has largely been lifted. This scarcity of trained and experienced labour is coming at a bad time for Indian manufacturers who have an opportunity to snatch business from Chinese competitors as western buyers seek to diversify supply chains during the pandemic.…

One year ago, there were few options in the Brazilian market of non-meat alternative products. But brands have started luring beef-crazy Brazilians into buying several plant-based meat substitutes, chiefly hamburgers. And some of the country’s biggest meat packers are now exploring this relatively small, but promising category.…

Few countries could claim to have weathered Covid-19 well but Singapore, micro-managed and highly-educated, is high on the shortlist. Even so, Covid-19 has had a detrimental effect on the southeast Asian city state’s paints and coatings sector and its impacts continue to linger.…