Africa’s cotton king could thrive beyond threads under its worldly new leader.

Trevor Hublin was Benin country director for the U.S. Agency for International Development as field operations ended around the world last year. Romuald Wadagni, elected as president in April, will assume office on May 24, 2026. Ahead of his inauguration, the International Monetary Fund praised Benin’s “strong reform drive” and highlighted the “need to manage socio-political and security challenges” in the Ohio-sized nation of 15 million people.

What should we expect from Benin’s worldly new leader Romuald Wadagni, educated at Harvard with years of experience at the international accounting and consulting firm Deloitte, including in France, America and the Democratic Republic of Congo?

A lot of continuity with the outgoing government of President Patrice Talon. After all, Wadagni was Talon’s economy minister for his entire presidency, from 2016 to this year, and was the architect for Benin’s impressive economic reforms and economic growth, which is one of the highest in Africa, having achieved 7.5 percent GDP growth in 2025.

Whether we’re talking private or institutional investors, Benin has a very good track record in attracting foreign direct investment. And Wadagni knows how to do that through good macroeconomic management, through good fiscal restraint, ease of business policies. We should expect him to continue to have a heavy hand in steering the economy. Benin remains a poor country, ranked 173rd out of 193 countries and self-governing areas in the United Nations Human Development Index.

He’s got work to do with poverty levels still at 36 percent. He needs to increase broad-based economic opportunity for Beninese citizens. I suspect that he will work hard to increase the productivity of the agricultural sector.

On top of economic management and the focus on continued growth, he’s going to try to get on top of insecurity in the north of Benin, where he likely will have his biggest challenge. Because when we talk about insecurity at the hand of violent extremist groups coming from the Sahel region, Benin needs cooperation with the neighboring countries: Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Niger, yet only has the ability to coordinate effectively with Nigeria and has no communication, has broken off relations with its key neighbor Niger.

Nevertheless, with the reinforced army presence up north, we should see more concerted action on his part to get on top of the high levels of violence at the community level – again, furthered by violent extremist groups – and stabilize the countryside as much as possible behind advances by the security forces, focusing on development needs.

Finally, will Wadagni loosen current severe restrictions on civil liberties on the political opposition and media in Benin? Over the past 12 years, the country has descended the ranks of democratic states and has become much more authoritarian, one party effectively leading the country and with civil liberties curtailed and key opposition politicians arrested by Talon. If Benin’s democratic environment remains closed, it could herald instability with the public in the future.

Wadagni clearly thinks in terms bigger than Benin. Do you see him trying to scale up Benin’s ambitions or building regional economic connections?

Yes. I expect him to come into the presidency with a bullish economic and investment agenda. What he is going to try to do and he has promised – you heard this on the campaign trail – is to maintain economic growth at 7 percent levels in the coming years. That would be an incredible achievement, putting Benin at the forefront of economic growth anywhere in Africa.

He knows exactly what he’s going to need to do: Continue to build investor confidence, continue to raise, through foreign direct investment and through investor-friendly policies, investment in growth areas in the agriculture sector, in light industry, in tourism.

Benin is a small country. It’s only a $25 billion gross economy. So, he will need to continue to attract investment as well as favorable lending. And positively there, Benin’s got a great reputation through its sound macroeconomic management, including a budget deficit estimated at less than 3 percent of GDP in 2025. Fitch just gave Benin a B-plus credit rating and raised its outlook from stable to positive, which for lenders means Benin will be a good place to continue to lend to, and that will boost Wadagni’s forthcoming country development program.

That program is going to focus heavily on infrastructure development, electrification, water and sanitation system development, port development, logistics – really trying to strengthen Benin’s reputation as a logistics hub for coastal West Africa. Benin actually has better macroeconomic financials than neighboring Côte d’Ivoire, which has a much bigger economy.

He’s going to try to focus on things like workforce development and to integrate young Beninese workers into new economic sectors that he hopes to stimulate, such as the digital sector, agroeconomic value chain and light industry.

Benin is Africa’s biggest cotton producer. What’s the impact of that on its economic choices and how the country’s politics work?

In 2025, Benin did move up in terms of rankings in Africa to first place on total output in the cotton sector with a yield exceeding 630,000 tons. So that placed Benin ahead of its major competitor, which has been Mali. Benin’s magic in terms of cotton production has been to invest in the fundamentals of sustained growth year in, year out.

When we look at where Benin was a decade ago, the country produced about 150,000 tons a year of cotton. It has steadily increased yields through those years, which has been underpinned by several things: investment in mechanization, investment in seed quality, the governance of the sector, particularly in properly managing the territory and the farmable land for cotton.

What’s also making Benin special in cotton is that they are moving deliberately away from just production and farming into value addition and processing. In terms of metrics, in Benin over 12 percent of the total national output in cotton in the past year was being processed in textile facilities in Benin, particularly with the majority located in the country’s Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone, where cotton spinning and textile garment manufacturing happens.

Nigeria showed off a big brother relationship with Benin by repelling a coup attempt last year. Did that action have bigger implications in terms of helping the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, restore policing of regional stability after the string of overthrows in the Sahel?

On December 7, 2025, Benin was hit by a coup attempt. And at the time, there was a lot of fear that Benin would become another statistic, drawing on the coups that had happened in the Sahel region – Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali – and elsewhere in the region over the past decade. And that didn’t happen. Benin activated ECOWAS’s response mechanisms and was able to get immediate military support from Nigeria in terms of decisive action in helping to thwart the coup attempt via aerial bombardments and air strikes. They got help from Nigeria, but they also got help from Côte d’Ivoire, another major regional power.

It did show that ECOWAS was capable of standing up for its own member states in thwarting coup attempts and maintaining security. Again, this was not all as a result of Benin’s intervention. France was active during this crisis in terms of mobilizing support, particularly from Nigeria. But the thwarting of the coup has served to buttress a better degree of confidence in ECOWAS.

Benin’s military has suffered losses from the spillover of insurgent violence in the Sahel. Are the coastal states in West Africa still vulnerable or are we seeing any hopeful signs?

2025 marked the worst year in terms of violent attacks and civilian casualties in Benin. It is very linked to patterns of regional violence sponsored, fomented by violent Islamist extremist groups that have their bases primarily in Burkina Faso but also Nigeria and Niger. The main terrorist group that threatens Benin is al-Qaeda and its regional affiliate known as JNIM. For this terrorist group, Benin has really since 2019 been regarded as a point of transit for the flow of weapons and resources, sustaining their insurgency and terrorist activities in the wider region.

Benin forms the link between Nigeria in the east and Burkina Faso in the west. When we talk about illegal commerce – fuel smuggling, the smuggling of cattle or other black market economic sustainment methods – Benin occupies a very strategic place geographically and economically for al-Qaeda. That is why the two most northern departments, Alibori and Atakora, which abut two major national parks, find themselves in a tough position. For several years, that has served as a base area for insurgent groups to permit them to control the region between the Sahel and the northern parts of coastal West Africa.

Al-Qaeda has not recruited heavily from within Benin compared to other countries. They draw the majority of their fighters from Sahelian countries. They haven’t established a firm anchor in the communities yet, which gives the Beninese government opportunities to reestablish governance, control and state legitimacy.

With France in retreat in West Africa, where does a country like Benin turn for support for economic guidance and capital for its development?

Benin is one of France’s closest allies anywhere in Africa, particularly in French-speaking West Africa. And that will continue during the presidency of Wadagni. He has long personal connections to France, he was educated in France, so he’s not going to change that relationship with France for support. Rather, what we’re going to see is continued work to diversify support for Benin. For example, Benin has courted investment and good relations with countries in the Middle East and the Islamic world.

As well, we will see Benin continue to try to build relationships with the United States, other countries in Europe, and certainly among its neighbors such as Ghana, Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire.

Based on your time in Benin, how would you advise investors to approach the country?

This is a great country to invest in because of its sound macroeconomic fundamentals and its business-friendly environment. Your first stop as an investor is to contact the Beninese investment promotion agency, Agence de Promotion des Investissements et des Exportations (APIEX), which serves as a primary gateway for foreign investors. In Benin, to register a business really takes about one day now. Permitting is relatively easy. Approvals for licenses happen quickly.

The other thing that you should expect, especially for investors in agro-business sectors, is to become aware quickly of the country’s premier industrial free-trade zone, the Glo-Djigbé Industrial Zone. Since 2022, and under the leadership of Wadagni, Benin has set up a 1,600-hectare special economic zone to transform raw agricultural materials – particularly cotton, cashews and fruit – into value-added, refined and processed materials ready for export. The firm that manages the zone is known as Arise, and they have received high marks.

Tourism is a big interest of the government, particularly in southern Benin, historical tourism along the coast. Benin now has many festivals celebrating its unique cultural heritage. New hotel resorts, including the first international five-star hotel chain with Sofitel hotels, have now opened in the capital city Cotonou. Business law is supported, and you have commercial courts in operation that facilitate adjudicating disputes. You’re going to have a very investor-friendly environment to take advantage of out there.

(Feature image: Wadagni by Presidency of Benin.)