4 - Solutions to Africa’s Development Challenges

Summary

Over the past few decades, the African continent has been described as being ruled by neopatrimonial regimes, a form of governance that seems not to be working for Africa. Some scholars tend to attribute the ubiquitous incidence of poor governance and underdevelopment of the continent to neocolonial activities, which they claim emanate from the intervention of such development partners as the World Bank. These activities, they argue, come in the form of foreign aid that purports to assist Africa’s development efforts, but with conditionalities that are more detrimental than helpful to the African economy. Yet, development partners are often criticized for not doing enough for Africa. This contradiction, which labels foreign intervention as a form of neocolonialism, while at the same time blaming international intervention for inadequate funding, has dominated Africa’s development literature to the extent that the role that Africans themselves ought to be playing in the process often receives little attention.

In this chapter, I explore the place of Africans in the development of Africa by examining the relationship between common misrepresentations about the continent and the types of change that would help position Africans as global citizens, as this relationship plays out in the areas of education, good governance, and self-help. The chapter draws on existing literature on misrepresentations of the African continent, as presented in some textbooks, and development discourses of international organizations and the popular Western media to examine how, in striving to enhance inclusion in a global economy, Africans end up on the periphery of the twenty-first-century knowledge economy.

The chapter is divided into three major parts: the first sets education as a foundation for Africa’s development by exploring the relationship between manpower needs and development and presents the challenge of reorienting the African mind to unlearn some traditions that do not conform to modern trends of interconnectedness. The key here is to illuminate educational contributions to the development of Africa, both locally and internationally, and to suggest areas that need radical reform. The second part establishes good governance as the engine of economic growth in Africa. It places Africans’ political expectations against actual development practices and examines how their differences shape the image of Africa.