Multi-criteria decision-making model for supporting manufacturing settlements location in Africa after COVID-19

The COVID-19 emergency is affecting manufacturing industries all over the world. Notably, it has generated several issues in the products’ supply and the global value chain in African countries. Besides this, Africa’s manufacturing value-added rate grew only 1.5 since 2018, and the foreign direct investment (FDI) from multinational enterprises (MNEs) remains very low due to high-risk factors. Most of these factors are linked to a non-optimized location selection that can adversely affect plant performance. For these reasons, supporting decision-makers in selecting the suitable country location in Africa is crucial, both for contributing to countries’ growth and companies’ performance. This research aims at presenting a comprehensive multi-criteria decision-making model (MCDM) to be used by MNEs to evaluate the best countries to develop new manufacturing settlements, highlighting the criteria that COVID-19 has impacted. Thus, it has affected countries’ performance, impacting the plant location selection choices. A combination of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods have also been used for comparative analysis. The criteria used in the proposed approach have been validated with a panel of MNEs experts.