We've looked at the issue from a few different angles including the despondent "IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough (UPDATED)" to the aspirational "Up to 500 Million Sub-Saharan Africans Would Like to Move to Europe; Mayfair, Monte Carlo Favored"
What most of our posts had in common, spoken and unspoken were "The Looting Machines of Africa" and "Needed: 800 Million Jobs For Africa"*:
By now most of our readers have seen a version of the U.N. projections for world population in 2050 and 2100. If not, here's a post from April with the graphic:
This may be one of the more important graphics you are likely to come across today.
Africa's population is projected by the United Nations to reach 2 billion people by 2045, 4 billion before the end of the century:
We followed up with "To Jumpstart Development, Should We Give Africa Bonds a Whirl?"
The problem, as always, is keeping the money from sticking to the hands of the kleptocrats,
And whether investment will actually do any good.
Following on "IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough" here are a couple women who have thought about this stuff, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala a former two-time Finance Minister of Nigeria and World Bank Managing Director, currently a senior advisor at Lazard and Nancy Birdsall, former EVP at the Inter-American Development Bank where she ran a $30 billion loan portfolio....
And today's headliner from Palladium magazine, June 7:
This article is based on a white paper published by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.
The scale of the challenge in fostering a prosperous African continent is daunting. Africa remains the poorest region in the world, with the extreme poverty rate in sub-Saharan Africa in 2015 standing at 41%, significantly higher than the global average of 10%. The World Bank also estimates that over half the world’s extreme poor reside in sub-Saharan Africa, with a total of 413 million people living in extreme poverty. Most of the world’s poorest nations are in Africa, including Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Niger, Mozambique, Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. Indicators of human welfare, including life expectancy, child mortality, access to education or electricity, and much more, all tell a similar story.
Strikingly, these patterns are discernable too in the arena of business and enterprise. Africa’s share of global merchandise exports stands at 2.5%. In 2017, only 43% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa had a bank account. Sadly, these percentages are not surprising in a region where property rights are inconsistently protected and rule of law may be weak or missing altogether, but regulatory obstacles are nonetheless substantial. By multiple metrics, including the Doing Business Index and both the Fraser and Heritage Economic Freedom Indices, most African nations rank among the worst in the world.
Many would view these statistics as evidence of poor human empowerment, proposing improved education systems for the next generation. However, Africa is by far the youngest region of the world, yet it has high levels of youth unemployment among both educated and uneducated Africans. This fact alone should alert people to the fact that more education is not a solution to the youth unemployment problem in Africa. Africans often joke that the first job for a Ph.D. is taxi driver. Shockingly, almost 50% of students with some tertiary education are unemployed in resource-rich nations.
Moreover, the definition of “unemployment” significantly over-counts those in dissatisfaction with part-time work. Such statistical analysis also fails to capture the reality of poorer nations, as they count those “searching” for work, and fail to recognize that the majority of people are either engaged in agricultural labor, resource extraction, or are “hustling,” doing whatever they can to bring in money—selling on the street, in the market, begging, prostitution, and so forth. Thus, the number of under-employed are much higher than those who are officially counted as “unemployed.”
The belief that increasing educational provision is the key to unlocking prosperity in Africa is therefore incorrect. African economies instead need market opportunities to make use of their abundant human capital, especially those who are highly educated but remain unemployed. The scale of the challenge is immense: the working-age sub-Saharan African population numbered 587 million six years ago, in 2018, and has been increasing by 20 million every year since. Of that total, 200 million are between the ages of 15-24, a proportion that will only very gradually decline over the next decades as Africa begins its demographic shift towards fewer children. How can Africa create hundreds of millions of good jobs in the coming decades?....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:September 2018
Robots and automation: it will be cheaper to operate robots in US factories than hire workers in Africa
August 2019
Zombiescapes Africa's Mega-City Addiction
Sometime this year Kinshasa DRC will pass Paris as the largest Francophone city in the world.February 2020
And sometime in the 2020's Abidjan, Ivory Coast will do so as well.
We're talking big cities.
And though they don't speak French, the citizens of Lagos live in a city of 24 million people, as large as Kinshasa and Abidjan combined.
With room for Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse and Nice as well.
Big.
Why Africa Has Found It So Difficult To Industrialize
There are development experts who believe it is already too late for Africa to industrialize, that the model which allowed Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, China and Singapore to escape the poverty trap may never happen again and the experts could be right.
On the other hand the Wuhan coronavirus may be offering one last opportunity for Africa to become part of worldwide supply chains at a level other than that of the extractive industries....
June 2021
"Three reasons to be worried about Africa’s progress"
*July 2022
United Nations: "2022 Revision of World Population Prospects"
November 2022
"Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century"
As the old-timers used to say, "Pay attention or pay the offer."
As noted above, we've looked at this from a few different angles.
Possibly related:
