Rwanda imports the overwhelming majority of the clothing its people wear. Uniforms, workwear, children’s clothes, the second-hand bales that fill market stalls — almost all of it is made elsewhere, from raw material that frequently left the continent in the first place. “Africa exports raw cotton and imports finished fabric at triple the price.” Diane Mukasahaha, founder and CEO of DIKAM Ltd, speaking to The New Times

That sentence is the entire business case for DIKAM, and Diane Mukasahaha has been making it for more than a decade.

It began with a few women and a sewing machine

She did not come from manufacturing. She spent decades working in health, and the idea that became DIKAM arrived in 2012 from a social observation rather than a commercial one: she wanted to improve the working conditions of women, particularly young mothers, who were earning very little from tailoring. So she started teaching a handful of them to sew, in her own home. The company was formally registered in June 2018, with two employees. It later moved to secure the space and the terms it needed to grow.

What the factory makes

DIKAM produces school uniforms, children’s clothing and ready-made apparel under the Made in Rwanda label — categories chosen deliberately. Uniforms are predictable, repeat, high-volume orders. They are exactly the kind of demand a young factory needs in order to justify machinery, train a workforce and hold quality steady long enough to be trusted with anything else. From two employees, the company now runs a workforce of around 400 people, roughly eighty per cent of them women, producing up to 10,000 pieces a day. It exports to Germany and the Netherlands.

That last fact is worth pausing on. A Rwandan garment factory selling into European markets is not a symbolic milestone. It means the output meets the quality, consistency and compliance standards that European buyers apply, which is the barrier most African manufacturers never clear.

The workforce had to be built before the factory could run

Industrial tailoring is not the same skill as tailoring. Producing thousands of identical pieces to a specification, at pace, on industrial machinery, is a trade — and it was not available in the quantity DIKAM needed. The company therefore runs apprenticeship and skills programmes teaching tailoring, textile production and life skills, and has trained several hundred people to date. This is usually filed under social impact. It is more accurate to call it production capacity: without it there is no second shift, no larger order, and no export contract.

Recognition, and what she did with it

In 2025 Mukasahaha was named among the top ten finalists of Africa’s Business Heroes, the prize competition run by Alibaba Philanthropy and the Jack Ma Foundation, selected from close to 32,000 applications across the continent. She was the only Rwandan in that final ten, and the grand finale was held in Kigali in December — the first time the competition had come to Rwanda. All ten finalists received grant funding from the competition’s USD 1.5 million pool, with the three top-placed ventures taking the largest awards. Her stated plans afterwards were unglamorous and specific: financing from the Development Bank of Rwanda to expand skills training and infrastructure, and partnerships with manufacturers in China and Bangladesh to strengthen the cotton-to-cloth value chain. She has also been looking at regional markets including the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon. Note what is missing from that list. There is no pivot, no new product category, no attempt to become something other than a garment manufacturer. The plan is to make more, better, closer to the raw material.

Why the value chain is the whole argument

Cotton grown in Africa is largely exported raw. It is spun, woven and finished elsewhere, and returns as fabric at a substantial multiple of what it left for. Every step of that processing is value, and jobs, captured somewhere else. A factory in Kigali cutting and sewing imported fabric is already a significant improvement on importing finished garments — it captures the manufacturing margin and builds industrial employment. Moving further upstream, toward fabric itself, is the harder and more consequential step, and it is the one her partnership plans are aimed at.

This is the same argument that runs through Rwanda’s industrial policy, and it is easy to state and difficult to execute. Someone has to buy the machinery, secure the working capital, train the workers, hold the quality, find the buyers, and persuade domestic customers to choose a local product over a familiar import. Each of those is a reason most people stop at a workshop.

What it actually takes

Two things stand out from how DIKAM was built, and both are transferable. The first is that boring demand is good demand. School uniforms are not an exciting product. They are repeat, forecastable volume, and that is what lets a manufacturer invest in capacity rather than chase orders. Founders looking for a first market often overlook the unglamorous contract that would actually fund the machinery.

The second is that the constraint is rarely the machine. It is the person who can operate it to standard, repeatedly, at speed. DIKAM spent years building that workforce because it could not be hired ready-made. Any manufacturer building here should assume the same and budget for it from the start. Thirteen years after she first gathered a few women around a sewing machine, the argument has not changed. The cotton still leaves. The question is how much of it comes back as something Rwanda made.