Within the next five years, Kenya hopes to attain 20 percent of its GDP from manufacturing. Adam Mohamed, minister for Industrialization and Enterprise Development recently sat down with CNBC Africa to discuss the route to raising the manufacturing sector’s contribution to GDP.

“One of the things that we have to do as a country is if we have to improve our trade balances, we must get into that 70 percent space,” he said. “Our major constraints that have continued to pull down our manufacturing sector has been the high cost of doing business in our economies.”

Mohamed also noted that specifically, the high cost of electricity and sometimes labor has created a noncompetitive manufacturing environment.