South Africa is no longer the most industrialised economy in Africa.

This is according to the African Development Bank (ADB), which released its Africa Industrialisation Index 2025 last month, assessing countries on their performance in 2024.

The ADB said South Africa had been overtaken by Morocco as the continent’s most industrialised economy, which it said was due to a combination of steady Moroccan improvement and slow South African decline.

“While South Africa remains a continental industrial powerhouse, it continues to experience a steady decline in industrial competitiveness,” the ADB said.

The ADB assigns countries a score by looking at a number of metrics, including the manufacturing sector’s contribution to overall GDP, education levels of the population, gross capital formation, the level of foreign direct investment, the ease of doing business, how corrupt a country is, and various indicators of macroeconomic stability, such as inflation and total debt owed by the country.

Using these metrics Morocco was assigned a score of 0.8415, while South Africa scored 0.8396. The ADB said that South Africa’s 2024 score was “its highest level since 2020, yet still below its pre-COVID performance of 0.8518. While this reflects the significant impact of recent shocks, it also confirms a longer-term downward trend, with performance declining from 0.8819 in 2010 and reaching a low of 0.8301 in 2016.”

The top ten was completed by Egypt, Tunisia, Mauritius, Algeria, eSwatini, Senegal, Namibia, and Côte d’Ivoire.

While three Southern African countries were in the top ten, two other countries in the region had seen significant declines. Lesotho had been ranked as the 16th-most industrialised country in Africa in 2010 but had slipped to 26th in the ADB’s latest ranking, while Botswana, ranked 9th in 2010, was now the 15th-most industrialised country on the continent.