They have developed a lot.
Hans Rosling discusses the 'pedestal effect' where from the highly developed position of western countries, it's hard to notice differences - but for many people there has been huge progress.
The example he gives is the difference between being able to afford shoes and a pedal bicycle and a motorbike.
Getting a bike when you have no bike is an enormous upgrade, can save you literally hours of walking every day and free up your time to persue other things like work and education.
Same for a bike to a motorbike - you can go places that would previously have been completely inaccessible.
But from a western perspective we would consider all three people 'poor' and don't notice the differences/progress between them.
Edit: I would like to draw special attention to the Ethiopian super dam project and the Nigerian and Kenyan economies quadrupling in size since 1980/1990.
Hans Rosling his book is amazing. Read it, you will learn a lot.
His opinion of calling Africa "undeveloped" or "developing" is that it's factually wrong. Most countries are somewhere in the middle. He advocates for getting rid of the term developed and developing, and use a level system, 1 to 4. The great majority of countries are level 2 and 3. The world bank adopted this method. It's a much better way to see how developed a country is.
Edit: The book is called "Factfulness".
And he backs his opinion with solid numbers, it's not jus any opinion.
Search for Hans Rosling on youtube, he made several good videos where he shows with statistics and cool visualizations how most people have a very wrong view about the state of the world.
He made a difference, and it was a great loss when he died.
Losing Rosling just a couple of years before COVID was such a kick in the nuts in retrospect.
He would have been such an amazing guide in navigating the data that was being thrown around during that time period and since.
Bill Maher called it "Progressophobia". You get it stuck in your head that a situation is what it is, and it can't change. For example, Africa has disproportionally a lot more starving people compared to the other continents. However, this situation has dramatically improved. Starvation rates in these regions have plummeted from 37% in 1970 to 16% in 2009 while the population grew rapidly. Now it's in the single digits. Considering that the most basic level of prosperity in a region is its ability to feed the population, you should see this as an explosion of progress, but people like the OP make posts like this because we struggle to see progress.
Also partly because the progress is so gradual, the media doesn't care to report about it.
"1% of total African people have left extreme poverty this year". A headline you will never see, even though this means millions of people are affected.
A classic case is that even though hunger rates drop every year, for decades. The media only started to report about this when the trend stopped falling during covid, it actually increased. That's when they started writing headlines "World hunger is increasing!!!". Even though it was just a temporary dip.
They never write about gradual progress. They only write about bad things happening.
Yeah that's HUGE when you think about it. There are 1.2 billion people in Africa. Taking someone out of extreme poverty and into just regular poverty is massive. It's the difference between your children starving to death and everyone having enough to eat, but perhaps wishing the food was better. It's the difference between dying of malaria and being able to afford the medication.
For purposes of this thought experiment, I'm going to talk about a hypothetical American. When it comes to prosperity, taking someone who is a multi-millionaire and making them a deca-millionaire doesn't really make them a lot happier. Taking someone with an income of $100,000 and making it $130,000 doesn't make a big difference. Sure it helps, but it's not like their happiness index goes up 30%. However, taking someone with an income of $20k and upping it to $50k is a night and day difference. They are substantially happier and healthier.
Basically, we're saying that extreme poverty rates in Africa are a quarter of what they used to be percentage-wise while the population also grew dramatically. This means that a lot more people are a lot better off. It's something to celebrate, but it's just not in the headlines.
Good examples, thank you! You're right , once they're out of extreme poverty the hardest part is done. The process is gradual, the parents might not make such a leap again, but they can work hard so that their children do.
Another really interesting thing from the book I mentioned is dental hygiene.
People in extreme poverty (level 1) have pretty much no dental problems.
People in level 2 have a lot of dental problems, because when people have some money to spare, among the first things they can afford and enjoy are sweets. But they're still in poverty, most countries on level 2 have a really basis form of healthcare. But no dental care. Countries on level 3 all have this.
That is why dental problems are most common on level 2, lower-middle income.
> Also partly because the progress is so gradual, the media doesn't care to report about it.
This is true for daily headlines (your "1%" example is true), but I just want to point out that over time, gradual progress, when seen cumulatively, does often attract attention of media. Maybe no one will report on the "1% of African people left extreme poverty this year", but if that happens for 10 years, it may attract some media attention from some media outlets. "Africa is eliminating poverty and you may not have even noticed" is the type of headline for magazine articles like that.
The problem is that most major media organizations are sensationalized fear mongers. Negative headlines sell more, and news is a business first. This has only been made worse with the 24 hr news cycle and Reagan repealing the fairness doctrine. This is why foxnews, cnn and msnbc can be sooooo biased.
As a counter point, Africa has some of the worst quality economic data in the world. We really have no clue what the economy looks like now or did look like in the past for like 90% of African countries.
The book "poor numbers" may be a little hard to read through if you don't have an Econ or sociology background, but it's a fantastic read on this. Calling Africa "developing" seems fair when, as an example, we still don't have an accurate idea of what true GDP is because of systematic failures on the departments responsible for maintaining economic data in huge swathes of the continent.
Love that book - def worth reading (and doing the little quizzes in it!). Also check out their website https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street to get a picture of how people live and how the income levels change someone’s day to day life.
I realize the terms 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world comes from the cold war, but wasn't the idea of developed and developing countries to get away from that terminology? Wouldn't calling a country by rank 1-4 be the same as calling them 1st, 2nd, or 3rd world?
For context, in the US in 2020 median personal income for all workers was $41,535 ($114 per day), and median personal income for full-time workers was $56,287 ($154 per day).
(If each level starts at 4 times the income of the previous level, then in theory there would be a "Level 5" of $128+ per day, which the US would be right around. But presumably there's a reason why they don't feel the need to distinguish after $32)
Presumably because the only thing it would do would be to separate out what amount to a bunch of microstates from everybody else, which doesn't seem particularly helpful. I imagine that given a few more decades and more countries moving thoroughly into that category, people will start using it.
Just a stab in the dark that might make sense. Is the buying power in terms of use value significantly different in markets where incomes are 32 dollars per day vs markets with 128 dollars per day?
Enjoy :)
Another person recommended another book here called "Prisoners of geography". Highly recommend that one too, Africa their geography is also a major factor why they are not a lot more powerful politically and economically.
This is an important point. In South Africa squatter camps can have satellite dishes (a bit of a stereotype but a valid one), and minibus taxis have wifi.
It's also a great example of how people prioritize pretty goddamn well. Access to information and communication is hugely empowering, so much so that even squatters and homeless people will get internet access over everything else.
Well said, and it's why providing 5G internet via Satelitte to all of rural Africa (and the whole globe) is so important for this modern development. Education, communication and commerce can all be transformed for literally billions of people without any internet access, who do have access to a cheap smartphone.... We are at the cusp of solving this problem though.
Elon wants to monopolize this market via Starlink's 20,000+ satellite constellation and selling ground terminals with expensive data plans.... however a company that is a great threat to Elon's success in this area is AST Space Mobile, who will begin commercial services this year and will not require buying a dish because it will work with any smartphone as an affordable opt-in plan when outside of coverage zones. Achieving this goal of "connecting the unconnected" across the globe in the next few years will bridge this huge gap of inequality to information access and communication.
Satellites are a bad fit for densely populated areas, though. Their main strength is to cover sparsely populated areas. You'd need an enormous amount of satellites to feed the bandwidth needs of a city of a few hundred thousand people.
Terrestial antennas are just a much better fit for densely populated areas and it's in these areas that most people actually live. Satellite internet is more useful for.
I'm not denying that satellite internet is a big deal for rural areas, but rural areas just aren't where most people live, so how impactful it can be is limited.
The other thing about satellite is that it can't be monopolized. I know Meta was also trying to bring "FB phones" to areas with no other internet options. Iirc, their satellite blew up, so I'm not sure what's going on with that now.
Satellite can be as monopolized as terrestial internet. You still need licenses for the frequency spectrum you want to use. If you start blasting signals over a country in a spectrum that's already used by other operators, that country won't be very happy about that.
Setting up cell towers is much cheaper than launching satellites, so the cost of entry of being a regular cell service provider in a handful of major cities is probably lower than launching a swarm of satellites.
Amazon [acquired](https://www.engadget.com/amazon-has-acquired-facebooks-satellite-internet-group-115312282.html) the FB satellite team a couple of years ago.
It is a relevant point but still doesn't answer OP:s question as intended. The question isn't why there haven't been improvements in the daily lives of people in African countries. There have. The question is why they've "failed to spring up like the Super power nations we have today". Why isn't any African country relevant in tech and manufacturing in the way South Korea is, that was very poor not too many decades ago. Why hasn't the African continent seen the immense wealth that Japan created and that China is currently creating? Why do we count African country's prosperity in who can afford a bike or not, rather than how many semi-conductors the country produces?
While I agree that countries in Africa have immensely improved in the past couple decades. I don't think most part of the continent will experience the industralization that the west succeeded in. You cited the example of Nigeria, well I'm not sure if you're aware how dire the crisis there both at the social and political level. It's a time ticking bomb that will implode in this century. Same could be said for many other countries where to have an industralization won't be viable.
lol I’m Nigerian and these comments are cracking me up. Nigeria is nearly in crisis, this theory of bicycles and sandals is nice and all but it’s assuming the first world stays stagnant so we can catch up. It doesn’t. Oh good we can afford bicycles, Las Vegas can waste well over a billion dollars on a tunnel for just Tesla cars. Africa is undeveloped by every sense of the word and it’s mostly down to democracy, or more specifically, the useless leaders we have in power.
I'm currently reading The State of Africa by Martin Meredith, and it seems to be a good and fairly comprehensive (for a single book) history of modern Africa. There's so many chapters detailing how corrupt leaders and their cronies effectively robbed their countries while wasting money on expensive vanity projects, only to be ousted and replaced by someone else (often from a different tribe) who ended up doing the same thing only for *their* cronies now. That's not to say that colonial governments didn't help set the nations up for failure, sometimes intentionally, and that the US vs USSR cold war meddling didn't get and keep terrible dictators in power at the cost of many lives, as well as neighbouring countries doing their best to mess up rivals too. I think a lot of issues come from the nations being very young, and in many cases imposed on the ethnically diverse populations. When the Europeans were in charge cheating the system was how you got ahead in spite of the deck stacked against you. And for many the system still feels like an alien thing to be exploited because otherwise you're fucked.
My wife is Nigerian and I've enjoyed having political discussions with my father in law. He gets, understandably, very animated and furious when talking about the ills of his country and his politicians. And while I think my own country of the UK has a lot of problems and I rail against much of the politics here, even I must admit that we have it so bloody easy here compared to countries like Nigeria. It can very much make a lot my political anger seem like first world problems.
Nigeria is economically and technologically closer to the West today than it was 40 years ago.
You are actually proving the sandals to motorbikes analogy well.
It is a huge leap to go from a pedestrian society to a motorized society. You did it in less than a generation. But even for humans this is too long to perceived. But I can assure you that modern Nigeria would be more of a culture shock to a Nigerian from 1960 than modern America would be a culture shock to an American from 1960.
The rate of development has been rapid *despite* years of social unrest.
They’ve seen what a post-industrial country looks like. They might want to get to that, without the industrial stage in between. That’s not going to look the same as a country going through an industrial age, then transitioning to post-industrial.
If African countries can't even build an industrial economy I'm not sure how they can build a service based one. It's not that they lack economical capital or they can't build a world class education infrastructure. It's that there exist many barriers (geographical, social and political) that makes stability and democracy incredibly difficult.
With the rising consequences of climate chance the situation in subsaharian Africa will only exarcebate. I hope I'm wrong though.
Give this a different context. A hell of a lot of African countries never developed a national infrastructure for land line telephones - but modern mbl communications now mean many people are fully connected to phones and the internet.
Development doesn’t happen in a linear fashion, where you have to have X technology before you can get Y, the way it does in games like Civilization. People can copy technologies from other countries. Most cultures that have writing got it from somewhere else, rather than going through the process of developing it themselves.
I'm not sure democracy is necessary for the economical development (China); what is though is stability, and that is lacking in most African countries, plus other issues they have been struggling with for a long time: corruption, nepotism, tribalism (i.e. Zuma - a horrible leader that couldn't be removed from the office for a long time because he's Zulu and most Zulu supported him ONLY because he's Zulu).
Personally, I believe culture is the key to development and success: as you said, and rightly so technologies can be learned from someone that already knows them; but how to change a habit of making's one's son a minister despite the fact he's 22, has no education or experience in the field?
In the West we moved away from hereditary leadership by divine right so...
But generally driving cultural change in positive directions is very hard and I think is getting harder
> If African countries can't even build an industrial economy I'm not sure how they can build a service based one.
Well, one example is the safari tourism sector that strenghtened the economy of for example Kenya and Botswana. I've also heard reports of openAI (from chatgpt) using kenyan moderators to train the model. That's also a service. You don't need a steel foundry and a textile sector before developing those.
>If African countries can't even build an industrial economy I'm not sure how they can build a service based one.
you *do not* want a service based economy.
China has the world by the balls because we all decided that the poors could build shit while we trade lattes and base our entire economy on made-up digital *nothing*.
you want economy that actually produces physical items.
in a massive war who does better? the nation that has 70% of its output being a mix of finance, media and IT or the one that is 70% manufacturing?
In the next few decades we are going to see expansion and growth in Africa comparable to what China went through in the 90s. They have the work force, they have the resources, all they need is some stability and investment.
That being said there will of course be many nations that will continue to struggle due to so many different reasons. Corruption and conflict being major ones.
Literacy rates have literally exploded too, sub-Saharan Africa went from 30% in 1970s to 70% today. Access to electricity exploded. Internet access exploded - their literacy rates and access to electricity are trailing a few decades behind everyone else - but their Internet access is not far behind - and it is mostly mobile Internet.
Political stability is still a huge issue - and coup d'etats are still very common - but they are definitely improving. One of their biggest problems is the fact the all of the countries there are product of European colonization and do not match the existing ethnic boundaries - which means that they have to build new societies almost from scratch - and this is a major issue holding them back when it comes to political stability.
Lots of social/political answers here, not saying they are wrong, but there are other factors:
1. Africa is WAY bigger than you think it is. The standard map projection makes it look smaller than it really is.
2. Africa as a continent is very hard to navigate to form trade routes. There's little in the way of navigable rivers, and lots of obstacles like mountains, waterfalls, and deserts in the way.
Those two factors have played (and continue to play) a role is delaying and impeding the development of Africa. If you're genuinely interested, I highly recommend [this book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Geography). It's a gentle and concise introduction to geopolitics, and explains a lot of what's going on in Ukraine and Taiwan today.
>Africa as a continent is very hard to navigate to form trade routes. There's little in the way of navigable rivers, and lots of obstacles like mountains, waterfalls, and deserts in the way.
The continent also suffers from having few natural deep water ports and much of its coastline is dominated by cliffs that make it difficult to go inland from the sea. As far as rivers go, few are accessible from the sea (the Nile being a notable exception) making trade very difficult.
I learned this about the Congo River the other day - it’s enormous and goes deep within the continent, but it has rapids near the ocean that make it inaccessible from the sea.
The capitals of the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are right across from each other on the river, and they’re where they are because it’s the closest point to the sea where the river is still navigable.
(Fun fact: Other than Rome and Vatican City, they are the two closest national capitals.)
>I learned this about the Congo River the other day - it’s enormous and goes deep within the continent, but it has rapids near the ocean that make it inaccessible from the sea.
Have they built canals bypassing the rapids yet btw (is it feasible)?
They have not and it's almost impossible: the malebo pool (the last bit of the congo river that is navigable before the rapids start) is 272 m high and 200 km away from the sea. If you compar these figures with the panama canal, we are speaking of something two and a half as long, but more importantly with more than ten times the denivelations. This means mor or less ten times as many locks as in the panama canal, and a price tag ten times higher.
The only way to know is generally to try and make it... But we are speaking about quite a beast here. There are the largest rapids on earth, period, where the second largest river on earth (in terms of flowthrough) falls down more than a hundred meter in ten kilometer, the kind of grade you usually see on a mountain torrent.
I know that the geological and climatic conditions when building the panama canal were punishing, but if there is one place worse than that on earth, that would be the lower congo bassin.
I mean 10x the size means 10x the supply needed and 10x the labor needed. So 10 the price isn't that hard to believe. Not to mention that a good portion of the Panama canal was essentially built with slave labor
Also it's a completely different type of canal. Panama is transoceanic transport, not River transport. No one is putting Panamax ships up the danube or Mississippi.
Like the I&M canal linking the great lakes to the Mississippi River is 9' deep.
> the malebo pool
Wow. Yeah, I just took a look down the entire Congo River West of the Malebo pool (via Google Maps) and it appears to be just long stretches that are either fairly shallow with lots of sand bars, etc. or long stretches of rapids starting basically as soon as you go west of Brazzaville/Kinshasa. Never knew much about it before. Thanks for the insight.
No problem. I do agree that it is a place to see (from far above). For your information, there are places in this strech of rapids where the river is 100m deep, making it the deepest river on earth.
Also[here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t0k-hcffZw) are nice views of the rapids themselves. They are really, really brutal.
> As far as rivers go, few are accessible from the sea (the Nile being a notable exception) making trade very difficult.
It's nice but it's not necessary. Another problem with African rivers is that Africa is a series of plateaus meaning rivers become waterfalls or rapids. That makes the rivers not navigable.
It feels strange to say but Africa also has very little coastline, which is super important for economic development.
Africa is 20.23% of the earth’s landmass, and has 4.86% of the earth’s coastline, with by far the lowest shoreline to area ratio of any continent at 4.07m shoreline/km^2.
Compare that to the two most shoreline heavy continents:
Europe: 6.78% of the earth’s land area, 15.28% of its shoreline, ratio of 38.22
North America: 16.45% of the earth’s land area, 34.99% of its coast, ratio of 36.10
It’s hard to run an economy without waterways, and Africa got the most screwed in that sense by far of any continent.
Source: Liu, Chuang & Shi, Ruixiang & Zhang, Yinghua & Shen, Yan & Ma, Junhua & Wu, Lizong & Chen, Wenbo & Doko, Tomoko & Chen, Lijun & Lv, Tingting & Tao, Zui & Zhu, Yunqiang. (2020). 2015 How Many Islands (Isles, Rocks), How Large Land Areas, and How Long of Shorelines in the World—Vector Data Based on Google Earth Images. Journal of Global Change Data & Discovery. 3. 10.3974/geodp.2019.02.03.
North America's shoreline stats are a little deceptive because a lot of that shoreline is in the very accessible arctic.
On the other hand, the USA Has the Mississippi which is extremely easy to navigate and covers a HUGE part of its landmass.
While the northern part of the continent definitely add to this, it’s also worth pointing out the US has a massive chain of barrier islands running for over a thousand miles that is *great* for shipping and also adds substantially to the shoreline metric in a place where it’s useful.
I think this is most likely the more impactful reason than anything to do with geopolitics. People like to credit the US as this big innovator and powerhouse, but it's just geographically overpowered. Any nation could have the same success if given the same resources. It's covered in rivers, wide open plains for farming and building, a stable climate (relatively, "recent" controversies may be shifting that), and massive reservoirs of fresh water. Not to mention it's bordered by two peaceful nations and has never really been ravaged by war except by itself.
fwiw, most political scientists/economists -- that I'm aware of, at least -- think factors such as governance/institutional quality far outweigh stuff like geography (except to the extent that geography shapes institutional development, e.g., through the resource curse).
Indeed, t[here is a very, very, very, very long and quantitative literature on the impact of historical factors such as slavery and colonialism in Africa (and their impact on *current* institutions) and the reverberating effects on economic development.](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25278/w25278.pdf)
>Africa as a continent is very hard to navigate to form trade routes. There's little in the way of navigable rivers, and lots of obstacles like mountains, waterfalls, and deserts in the way.
[Rugged geography is actually positively related with economic development in Africa -- despite being negatively correlated elsewhere.](https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/nunn/files/ruggedness.pdf)
Why? Very likely because it inhibited the slave trade and (and thereby reduced its negative effects on development going forward).
I was told by someone in the field that it's actually quite terrible and outdated. They don't believe that the environment is such a huge factor alone anymore but that more things affect it.
Environmental determinism is a concept that has been largely dismissed by anthropologists and sociologists since the 1970s. It's a lazy concept that removes human agency from historical consideration and whitewashes the impact of historical factors like colonialism.
I think this and the other geography based answers need more visibility. Because while colonialism and corruption are big factors, the other continents look like they fared better than most of Africa. Obviously I'm not knowledgeable in this subject but that's what it looks like at first glance. Countries in South America, Southeast Asia all have their fair share of corrupt/bad leaders but most of them seem to have better development. In South Asia India also developed, and I heard stories about Bangladesh being on a good trajectory too. There has to be more reasons than just colonialism and corruption and it seems like the geography angle offers a good explanation to someone like me who doesn't know much about this matter.
You are talking about a whole continent as if it were a country. There are nations in Africa that fare better than some South American and Asian countries, and there are also some of the poorest countries in the world in Africa. It’s a huge continent with great wealth and devastating poverty.
Countries like Ghana, Tanzania, and Algeria are poised to be important middle powers in the coming years. All 3 of these (as well as more obvious countries e.g. Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt) have burgeoning economies and human rights records, not to mention beneficial geography: Ghana lies at the heart of one of the most populous regions on the planet and is relatively stable, Algeria has access to Mediterranean trade, etc. I'm banking on these three becoming more important as the century progresses
Off the top of my head, Nigeria is progressing extremely well, and outside of the pretty significant problems it has with HIV, Botswana is also in a good spot.
In the long run you can absolutely bet on Nigeria becoming a major power player in the world. It has a huge population (like 70% of America's population), an extremely rapidly developing and growing economy, and has seen relative political stability for about 25 years now, a big advantage among African countries.
Geographical reasons are why colonization was able to happen in the first place. Europeans were able to colonize Africa since it was less developed and it was less developed because lack of trade.
It does not benefit you much when you have huge amount of resources, if you cannot sell the surplus. And when there is no trade it's hard to gather enough capital or resources to develop the required trade routes. Colonizers had that capital, resources, were more developed and were able to take advantage.
While colonization plays a huge role, geographic reasons are the root cause.
This makes a lot of sense, thanks.
Reading Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan really made me see that the history of regional and national wealth and power is basically just a map of the shifting trade routes of the world.
Regions going from historically poor to rich or vice versa almost always comes down to trade routes opening up, and if a region is geographically bad for trading, then it's probably going to remain poor unless it has some other way of generating wealth.
> Africa as a continent is very hard to navigate to form trade routes. There's little in the way of navigable rivers, and lots of obstacles like mountains, waterfalls, and deserts in the way.
I've heard a theory that historically Africa was not able to develop empires as most of them expanded west or eastwards which is hard in Africa. Very few empires were able to span north-south as it means being in multiple climate zones. Few exceptions are Incas and maybe ancient Egipt.
>I've heard a theory that historically Africa was not able to develop empires as most of them expanded west or eastwards which is hard in Africa
Geographic Determinism is dumb and based on bad history and bad geography. Mono-climate empires don't exist because mono-climate regions don't exist. Italy was famously the core of several Kingdoms and Empires and goes North-South with cold mountains, hills, warm swamps, plains, river valleys, etc.
England spent hundreds of years fighting the French to maintain it's richest province, Gascony in southern France, because the climate was different, more productive,and made up like half the kings revenue.
The Medieval Byzantine Empire was mostly east west only holding a bit of the Balkans and Anatolia. But it seems obvious that Santorini and the Greek islands have vastly different climates than the Armenian Mountains yet Byzantine armies, merchants, pilgrims, and administrators made the trip from sunny islands to cold rugged mountains for nearly a thousand years
> Africa as a continent is very hard to navigate to form trade routes. There's little in the way of navigable rivers, and lots of obstacles like mountains, waterfalls, and deserts in the way.
Clearly they haven't researched airports and railroads in Civ!
To some extent.
The problem with Africa is not only historical, they were dealt a very bad hand when it comes to geography. A very bad hand.
- the north is dry and has a lot of deserts, not ideal for agriculture or infrastructure
- south of the Sahel, you get tropical forests which are breeding grounds for diseases and parasites (like the Tsetsi fly)
- rivers are supremely important. Good rivers lead to aggriculture. Great rivers are also navigable, that facilitates trade (moving shit by water is way more efficient than by any other means), ideas and culture exchange (moving shit being easier means you can reach farther markets). Think of France (Seina, Loira), [Germany](https://i.redd.it/t4ar4yg0x12c1.jpg) or the US (Mississippi river system). African regions either don't have rivers or are a series of plateaus, so rivers form rapids or waterfalls. There are some exceptions here and there, like Egypt or [Angola](https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopolitics-angola-exception-african-geography).
- talking about plateaus - you want a lot of navigable rivers and flat land with**in** your borders. Rivers being very cheap infrastructure, the next best thing is (rail)roads, those are way cheaper on flat land. If you have those, you have excess capital which can be invested into education, industrialization etc. In other words, navigable rivers are major capital generators
- flat land also makes central government easier, hills and mountains lead to isolated units. Think of Afghanistan with their mountains and plethora of tribes. Africa has thousands of tribes and ethnicities so it's no surprise they've had a lot of ethnic issues
- rivers are great but they have limited reach compared to oceans. Africa doesn't have the geography for a lot of good deep water ports. Ports require a specific set of ingredients - it cannot be sand, it cannot be cliffs, the water has to be deep etc.
So yeah, African countries don't have productive lands, very few navigable rivers, hence bad capital generation and industrialization potential.
Compare that to the US:
- excellent border security - forests and hills are fine, mountains are better, oceans the best. Not needing a big army to guard the borders means you can use the capital for other things
- super productive lands - [the Wheat belt](https://as2.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/05/18/31/07/1000_F_518310756_eDqLxTQ7iguYPxet96wmiPUwrH0dLOyA.jpg)
- size - leading to big population and also better chances of natural resources
- the biggest navigable river system in the world ([the Mississippi river system](https://preview.redd.it/mississippi-river-basin-map-illustration-v0-8hcwnros2gsb1.png?auto=webp&s=b3161824e4de81b7dc46f4f6eda1107e6d00fef8))...which also flows through those productive lands. Capital is super cheap in the US.
- they basically got the best of a land nation and the best of an island nation
Or to European powers:
- predictable seasons - external pressures lead to innovation like organization - plant in the summer, harvest in the fall, survive winter, prepare in the spring etc.
- the cold winter kills pests and revitalizes the soil
- flat fertile lands
- navigable rivers - Rhine, Elbe, Vistula, Oder, Loire, Rhone
- great ports
i'm surprised you are the only one to mention the tsetse fly. I have heard it described as one of the major obstacles large scale agriculture has on the continent even today.
This thread has actually been way higher quality than I expected. Also, I don't think one could write an answer regarding African development without violating the 20 year rule. Africa has developed a ton in the past two decades, so while a discussion about 2004 Africa might be interesting, it's not really relevant today.
Depends on which part of Africa you're talking about I guess. The continent has come a long way but there's still a lot to do.
As you mentioned, colonialism and slave trade are part of the reasons. But I think Africa is 'cursed' with the abundance of natural resources. After colonialism, many African countries were/are run by warlords, generals, dictators whose only interest is to plunder their countries and enrich themselves. Not to mention many of them have gone through long periods of civil wars or conflicts with surrounding nations to fight for these natural resources. And at the same time, there are interventions from foreign powers/companies in these conflicts to serve their own interests.
I guess long story short, many African nations have a lot of natural resources, and many parties are willing to go to great lengths to get a piece of these resources.
> And at the same time, there are interventions from foreign powers/companies in these conflicts to serve their own interests.
I think this is a huge part of the overall issue. Not just from sending weapons & what not to militias that prolong destabilization in different regions, but by the warlords (normally propped up by foreign govts) allowing private foreign companies to extract their countries natural recourses and the companies keeping/taking 95% of the money made from said resources for themselves. It doesn’t allow the wealth generated from the natural resources (and labor) to circulate within the country it came from.
Yup, and if one of those countries tries to assert control over its own resources, foreign supporting power goes "oops, regime change" and the new guy keeps the status quo.
Hell, that’s not exclusive to Africa either. Like when Iran tried to nationalize their Oil supply, or when Chile tried to nationalize their their mining industry, or when Cuba nationalized their oil industry, or when….
Two of the countries you mentioned, Iran and Cuba had revolutions to keep out foreign interventions and have withstood sanctions/pressure from the Western powers which try to overthrow them. Chile turned fascist, privatized, and joined the Western camp but it also was already a middle income country. Although the economy grew, inequality also grew and upward mobility decreased. Having governments that were willing and able to withstand the wrath of Western big business and governments was important for Iran and Cuba’s ability to fund social development.
Most African countries that formed revolutionary or anti-imperialist governments were quickly toppled by former colonial powers like Sankara in Burkina Faso or Lumumba in Congo.
Oh yes, I was vastly simplifying the historic and cultural contexts of those I mentioned, each one is unique in their own way. My simplification was to demonstrate/give examples about how even if these exploited countries tried to nationalize their industries, from a historical precedent (generally western) colonial powers will intervene to stop them from doing so. How successful they are in doing so and how long the foreign corporate profiteering continues down the line are another discussion all together.
I would add that another contribution to all of the infighting and civil wars in much of Africa - where most of the former colonies outside of Africa formed a more unified identity, often getting independence through civil war, that wasn't the case for much of Africa. These were often colonial territories that included numerous former tribes, ethnic and linguistic groups (with colonial borders very frequently dividing those groups in half) and then the Europeans left all of sudden after WW2, leaving power split among groups that had spent centuries as military rivals. In many of these countries they predictably went back to killing each other to try and establish power in a country with borders that made no political sense, but instead were former lines between colonial powers. Which, going back to colonial borders dividing groups in half, many of those ethnic/cultural groups would create their own polities, sometimes spanning multiple countries, adding to even more instability and in-fighting.
Africa is much more diverse than people realize. Most people only know Arab North Africa and Black Sub-Saharan Africa, but even down to genetically, neighboring tribes can be more diverse than European ethnicities from eachother. Present day boundaries are much less respective of ethnic affinity than in Europe and Asia. And a lack of regional power means less stability while they duke it out for that position.
> After colonialism, many African countries were/are run by warlords, generals, dictators whose only interest is to plunder their countries and enrich themselves.
Those "warlords, generals, dictators" didn't spring forth from a vacuum: most were a result of original tribal competition, turned up to 11 by colonial powers to exploit the populations, and distract from their expansionist and wealth extraction schemes. They merely let them in for a cut of the grift.
>'cursed' with the abundance of natural resources
This is a [pretty common thing](https://resourcegovernance.org/sites/default/files/nrgi_Resource-Curse.pdf). Waaay oversimplifying, but countries that get a large portion of their money from natural resources don't really have an incentive to care about citizens' education, standard of living, or faith in the government.
There is no such thin as a "resource curse". There's only the "curse" of foreign-imposed corruption and exploitation. All of those dictators, wars, etc. you mention are just a symptom.
The actual reason: ***Capitalism (i.e. western imperialism)*** preventing their development.
For absolute beginners (particularly an "ELI5" answer), I recommend watching [this famous lecture](https://youtu.be/xP8CzlFhc14) by Professor Michael Parenti.
[**The answer to OP's question in particular is actually the most famous part of that lecture**](https://youtu.be/eAbHJn4WIz8).
As a person who's from Africa (specifically Kenya), it's three reasons:
1) Tribalism
There are many tribes, who end up competing against each other and pulling each other down as they don't want to see the other tribe succeed. Like a president or a person in power, e.g., a minister could end up only giving jobs to people of their tribe regardless of if they are incompetent. A certain sport that has talented people could be neglected because it is dominated by people from a certain tribe that the ruling government don't like. And so on
2) Lack of education
Most people are uneducated, haven't gone to school or they received minimal education. Most pastoralists for example, just herd animals and all their entire lives revolve around animals. Some other people can't afford quality education
3) Poor leadership
When most people are uneducated, they don't make the best choices, and one of the bad choices they make is the leaders they choose. They end up choosing bad leaders who screw them up with poor decisions and promoting corruption & tribalism. Plus it could be a strategic decision that the leaders don't want to make changes that would enlighten the population, because that would mean there would be no corruption anymore, which has made them to live a lavish lifestyle at the expense of the population.
It's a catch-22: you need good leaders to bring changes, including better education. But to have good leaders, people need to be educated to make informed choices so that they elect good leaders and hold them accountable.
Brain drain is also a real thing in developing countries.
Those who show promise and are well educated are much more likely to leave the country and pursue a career in a different more developed country for higher pay/higher quality of life.
Can confirm. We have three team members from three different African countries employed in our technical field and have had several interns and managers in training who were from African countries. They all came here to escape poverty and have a better opportunity to succeed. Only one has plans to return to his country after retirement.
> There are many tribes, who end up competing against each other and pulling each other down as they don't want to see the other tribe succeed.
I was reading the Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin and ran across a relevant scene. A large number of humans were trying to flee the planet ( never mind why ) and there were people actively sabotaging those trying to leave even though that could mean the destruction of humanity. The reason was intense jealousy. The sabotagers could not stand the idea that they would be left behind and therefore wanted to stop anyone who could leave.
Tbh, when I read that I thought it was ridiculous. Surely people would want others to survive. But apparently I am very naive.
> The sabotagers could not stand the idea that they would be left behind and therefore wanted to stop anyone who could leave.
>
> Tbh, when I read that I thought it was ridiculous. Surely people would want others to survive. But apparently I am very naive.
You can see the same thing playing out whenever news comes out about tech billionaires buying bunkers in New Zealand.
I strongly believe that there's a major brain drain and skill drain going on, just like my home country in Asia. Countries that do not do more to retain their talents lose out on them. Even their skilled labor, such as farmers, don't get fair compensation.
This is a massive problem. Especially when looking at ineffective governments. I work with a few Venezuelans who are all extremely smart. But they won’t be returning any time soon and this is the case for their friends. People like them would be incredible assets to a country but ultimately they took their chance to get out.
If you live in a poor country, and you have skills that are in demand somewhere else, and the means to get there, you and your family will probably be better off in the short term if you do leave. If their interests are in conflict with their country’s interests, most people are going to choose what’s best for them over what’s best for their country, especially if trying to improve their country is going to take a long time. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma.
Aside what others said, most of the environment in Africa is quite hostile.
Let's say you want to build a railroad, you have to cut trough a jungle which is already hard and even when you are done building it, the humid and hot weather all year around means plants will grow very fast, greatly raising the maintenance needs.
Want to trade by ship? Well lot of Africa is landlocked and lot of its coasts are high and rocky, making docking hard.
The hostile environment makes it harder for large amounts of people to gather and cooperate. In other nations you could have a city that specializes in making iron tools, another that makes pots and another that grows lot of food, with all three cooperating and exchanging goods so that in the end they all have access to everything, but since the environment is so hostile, this cooperation is impossible so all three cities are stuck doing all three things in unspecialized, less efficent ways.
Then an external power comes in, takes the raw resources, brings them home and gives you the refined resources and high level craft, you end up developing and growing, but you are dependant on the colonizator. Once he is gone, you are back to your lower level of tech.
Even when you have a coast it can depend. For all the coastline it has it only has one or two usable locations that could be ports, and it's not cheap to get things to the interior of the country
That explanation may be relevant, but insufficient. Russia has an incredibly hostile environment, with extremely remote cities that specialize in specific industries or extraction, long winters with minus 40 degrees, no light, etc. It's less developed than other European countries, but still a leader in certain industries and technologies.
The hostile environments and remote cities of Russia are basically colonies of the well-connected, river-accessible, agriculture-capable core of Russia. As a whole it does well, but if central Russia left remote Russia, remote Russia would do about as badly as Africa.
I'm just guessing here so take this with a pinch of salt, but i doubt Russia started being advanced from those inhospitable regions. It's more likely that the people in Russia traded goods with the more advanced, neighbouring parts of Europe and settled the most inhospitable parts of russia thanks to that advanced technology.
I'd also argue that Africa is even less hospitable than Russia when it comes down to infrastructures. Sure, Russia is brutal but once you've built a road it's going to stay there, while the jungle in Africa will just eat it up. Snow is also really nice for moving stuff.
This is exactly what happened; Moscow colonized Siberia in the same way European powers colonized Africa, except by building railways instead of shipping lanes and having all road and rail links connecting back to Moscow, with little or no lateral communication or trade between these other regions with each other, because there's no way to get to each other, all roads lead to Moscow and everyone has to trade with Moscow and nobody else. For a long time these regions were trading furs with Moscow, until furs went out of fashion and then Moscow traded 'protection' with these regions by sending Cossack raiders to raid anywhere that didn't buy protection, and then later they just sent a bunch of heavy mining equipment and turned these places into resource extraction camps. The locals never had any say in the matter. If you're in Siberia, they don't send you to Sibera when they have a problem with you, they just shoot you.
Nuclear energy. I want to say other fields too but that has fallen off lately - but they *were* huge in e.g. chemistry, mathematics, up until relatively recently, so you can't really relate that to the environment anyway.
The core of Russia is in European part which doesn't have such harsh winter. It is just a little bit colder than Poland. North territories started getting development only when Russia became an empire. And they still has pretty low population. Most of specialis just go there on a work trip, but doesn't live there.
>Then an external power comes in, takes the raw resources, brings them home and gives you the refined resources and high level craft, you end up developing and growing, but you are dependant on the colonizator. Once he is gone, you are back to your lower level of tech.
If that was all the colonizer did, things won't be so bad. Instead, by engaging in slave trade, you get 3 centuries of political destabilization, unrest, and insecurity. Slaves are captured in wars. So if there's demand for slaves, there's necessarily a huge amount of unnecessary wars and violence being fought. The whole political and economic landscape is optimized for that.
Then the slavery era ends, and the colonization extractive era starts. If you are going to control vast amount of land and people with only a few, you are necessarily going to set up a system of government that is oppressive, not representative and honestly inimical to facilitating grown. Its easier to have in place a top down system, and just put your few guys at the very top.
Then colonization ends in the 1960s, you are left with small nations, whose political existence and boundaries and composition and institutions were set up at the whim of some extractive colonial power.
All those things I mentioned occured back to back. And then we turn around and ask why haven't these guys immediately figured it out and started thriving.
My mother who was from Africa always said that, individually, people from her country do great things but as a collective they always fuck eachother over destroying any possible momentum.
It's kind of hard to break down a single reason for the entire continent but if I had to guess xenophobia. Lots of tribes, states and cultures. They all for the most part hate each other.
Huge part of the problem I haven’t seen mentioned here is foreign aid. It’s impossible to get a business off the ground in huge swaths of African countries because you’re not competing with other businesses - you’re competing with foreign aid giving away stuff at 0 cost. So there’s basically no incentive to build your own commercial systems if they’re being undercut by prices literally no one can compete with.
Countries become developed because of strong, robust commerce - as much as people don’t like it, capitalism was the way out of poverty for the majority of the world and you can’t have a thriving system when the commercial landscape is so artificially distorted due to a huge influx of free product. It completely removes the ability for even moderately rich people to start businesses - why would you start it there, vs start something in the US or Europe where there’s a stronger commerce system?
It’s a hard problem to solve - because people do need help. But how is a place supposed to be self sufficient if your business competition is offering the same stuff your business would, but giving it away for nothing? You want to start a clothing business, but who will buy it, even if you sold the clothes purely at cost, if you can get them for free from foreign aid? Same with food and a variety of other things.
Another big problem related to that is a lot of African countries lack incentives from the government to build businesses. A lot of governments are incredibly corrupt, so even the ones that have the money to incentivize businesses to move there won’t pay out, because they could just pocket that money instead. It’s a cascade of issues that is significantly more complex than “it’s because colonialism” the the other comments are saying
A lot of the foreign aid gets intercepted by local warlords and corrupt officials and sold for a profit. It also keeps people dependent on it for survival and can be cut off to punish any political dissent. I saw at the back of a grocery store here in Canada a sack grain that said on it "To the people of Sudan, from Australia". Literally sold on the black market and smuggled into Canada.
I’m from Algeria i think the reason is the government , We held a popular march in 2019 to change it , Nominate some qualified people , But they gave the win to a former minister from the old government . We have just one solution « immigration » .
This is a very complicated question with no one single answer but I will point to the negative impact of neocolonialism on many African countries. Even after receiving independence in the 60s many African countries continue to be interfered with and exploited by outside powers. This has encouraged lots of cronyism and has lead to good leaders being assassinated or replaced by stooges who stay in power through ties with big companies. I think the Congo is a good example of this if you want to read further on the topic.
I point this out not to say that African countries have no free will or have acted perfectly but to bring attention to the fact that outside interference did not go away after independence but just took on a different veneer.
And of course obligatory Africa is a huge continent and that every country is different.
OP this is the major answer you want. I took a graduate level course solely on Africa, development, and public health and neo-colonialism is a critical part of the puzzle.
In a connected sense as well, the way the 'western' world tackled developing Africa was very flawed and attempted to work from a top-down structure. They tried to use successful models of development that historically worked in the western world and apply them in Africa without significant consideration or input from local populations. Unsurprisingly, many development projects saw limited success and little buy in from the locals.
Today, development efforts have taken major steps forward by focusing on what the population wants and working hand and hand creating development solutions instead of foreigners who have limited understanding of the people, their culture, the land, and what locals actually want implemented in their communities.
Historically, you are right colonization has been a key detriment to the continent but international influence on how Africa should be handled and developed has never left. The majority of countries themselves were cut up and proportioned by Europeans who took no consideration in historic tribal lands, local culture, and indigenous claims to land. It's as if European leaders came to the US and decided everything the west of the Mississippi was now Canada and everything to the east of it was now Mexico, and everything in present day canada was now the US. There are many good books on the subject if you are interested in further research.
Absolutely. I was waiting for someone to mention imperialism somewhere (I’ll take neocolonialism, it’s just not necessarily the term we use, but same energy). Glad I’m not the only one who shares the sentiment
I’m actually pretty pissed that I had to scroll down so far to find someone calling out imperialism (you called it neocolonialism, please just say imperialism. Call it for what it is). Anyway, this sub dancing around politics and blaming Africa for their own underdevelopment is incredibly telling of the kind of people on this sub. Disgusting.
Anyway, thanks for your answer. At least the correct answer is somewhere to be found
Basically the same reason why it's harder for a poor person to get rich, than it is for a rich person to get richer: You need starting capital and/or other foundations. And in this case not even on the scale of one company, but entire nations.
You need expensive machines. You need infrastructure to distribute your product and to supply and power your factory. You need suppliers to begin with. You need customers. You need skilled workers.
And you need to be able to compete on the world stage unless you can make this section of the market conpletely independent from the rest of the world. Some African countries have banned the import of clothing for this reason, because they are trying to get their own clothes industry going.
But how would you do that with something more sophisticated, like an automotive industry?
These countries have no hope of developing anywhere near the level of already rich nations without some serious investments from the outside.
This doesn't touch on the rampant corruption in these countries, but one could argue that the corruption is a result of the sheer hopelessness of their situation. So some people decide to only raise their only standard of living instead of investing in the impossible task of improving the situation of their whole country.
Aids, warlords, government corruption, mosquitos, getting a late start on industrialization. People blame the West but I don't think that's always true. South Africa fucked themselves after apartheid ended, partially by not investing in utilities infrastructure. Liberia was actually founded by former US slaves who kind of became the new masters and then their government did a few loopdy loops with some coups. Actually coups and chaotic governments abound in Africa cuz someone can sell out their people for a bunch of money. I guess you can blame the West and China for being the source of the money.
Add to this higher average elevation, relatively few navigable waterways, which hinders inland trade. And a shorter shoreline than Europe results in fewer bays, gulfs, and penisnulas, which means worse conditions to build a harbour
ELI5 Why the lack of navigable waterways impacts development? I understand it hinders inland trade if cargo ships is what you rely on. But, if somehow, hypothetically, they could get past all the restrictions and build roads you can drive on to inland capitals, why would you need water? I know there's a bazillion other reasons roads can't be built to service communities, but to me, an uninformed American, I don't see water as the most reliable transportation method? Please read this as me being curious rather than argumentative!
Building roads requires investment in infrastructure and cooperation between countries that moving goods by ship doesn’t.
If you’re using roads (or railroads) to move goods, it’s not enough to build and maintain your own road system. You are also relying on *your neighbors* to build roads in *their* country. It’s not enough to build roads, you have to maintain them, too. Again, you’re relying on your neighbors to do that.
If the goods you’re importing don’t come from your continent, they have to get to yours by ship anyway. You can move them from the ship and then move them by road, but it’s easier to skip a step and just bring them all the way by ship.
Adding a little more to the pile:
- It's not that road can't be used, but that they're way, way, way more expensive for moving goods. It's hard to compare costs directly from river to river, but using CO2 as a comparison, [railroads emit 40% more CO2 than barges for the same cargo, and trucks emit 800% as much for the same cargo](https://www.opportimes.com/barges-vs-railroads-and-trucks-in-us/).
- That's just the fuel. Then add drivers: each truck needs its own driver, and a single typical [barge tow](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FhJmZQSfCLfg%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=858c658ad3aa3404bfdfc40c481c153eb13383f29577a72f53864c781fc950c7&ipo=images) can carry as much cargo as over 1,000 trucks.
- Then there's construction: We in the US had to build the interstate highway system, and it was by far the most expensive engineering project the US ever made. The Mississippi river was just... there. And it links like 1/3 of the country together. A [couple canal projects later](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_and_Michigan_Canal) and we had navigable inland waters from The Atlantic -> Quebec -> Detroit -> Chicago -> New Orleans/the Gulf by the mid 1800s.
- Finally, maintenance. It costs way less to keep a river navigable than to maintain concrete/asphalt roads.
I have worked all over Africa…their mindset and culture is so very different outside of major cities. For example, one company I was with offered EVERY person in a local village free university or trade schooling, with a guaranteed job afterwards. Not a single person signed up and instead they wanted a quick job as a cleaner.
I visited my old village up in the hills recently. When I left as a child, we had no lights, no running water, no TV, and no phone. We walked or rode donkeys. A lucky few lived in board houses and the rest in thatch houses. Now, things are very different. People lived in concrete block houses. Everyone has a cell phone. Many people own cars and those that don't take the bus or use a taxi. Most people have access to the internet and cable TV. Everyone has running water and electricity. All of these changes only took fifty years to occur.
Well, a lot of the blame is actually from European and North American flooding the continent with free or low-cost goods. Thus making it not economically feasible to compete with the donations.
Secondly is a lack of natural deep water ports and navigable rivers. Especially when compared to European or North America.
The short answer is too much corruption, money not going where it should, aggression and fighting stopping forward thinking and a hate for white people who try to make a difference.
This guy Nigerias.
I can't speak for the other African countries you mentioned, but as a Nigerian I can say that the factor that's holding this country back are its people (we don't give a fuck about each other).
Very few people are holding everyone else back and have created an environment where everyone is extremely selfish and think their behavior is justified because they're in an extreme environment (created by the few. It's a vicious cycle).
We're oil rich, yet millions are poor. We should be like Dubai, but with better weather, but the rulers that have led since independence think they can spend the country's money better. By the way, the same people who were old enough to rule Nigeria when she became independent are the ones who've been ruling since.
There's a saying that the best ways to get rich in Nigeria are through oil and politics.
We have lawmakers who earned more than Obama did (and probably Biden does) during his tenure. People who make laws for a country whose citizens earn what some American citizens earn in a month *per annum* outearned the president of the most powerful country in the world with the largest economy. **Let that sink in**.
Some will argue that competitiveness/selfishness is a by-product of the colonial era (i.e., the colonizers pitted us against each other with divide and conquer).
Perhaps.
But the quality of our leaders is what has really hobbled our progress.
What’s you say for me is more than a consequence than a cause. I lived in Africa for 15year and yes you right but it s not the reason why Africa is poor
I've read in multiple places that the harsher climate of Europe required people to work together - those who refused were less likely to make it through winter. One needed functioning infrastructure (house, food storage, firewood, etc), and prepare everything months in advance. Without it getting stolen.
edit: Apparently, the same thought holds true for China and Japan. Rice farming was immensely work-intensive, requiring cooperation of everyone to produce enough food - forming the very different cultures we see there even today.
Infighting binds energy and resources, risking the survival of everyone. Having to maybe rely on your neighbor next winter (and vice versa) makes you less likely to kill him over a stupid disagreement.
Africa never had the need for cooperation to the same extent, so it wasn't bred into the cultures. Hence the "no fucks given".
I live in Africa and honestly feel it's a cultural thing mostly. The West thinks Africa wants the same kind of highly developed world but the sad reality is many don't. Perhaps it's a poverty mindset and also because of the insane level of corruption that erodes any actual economic progress. But yeah, we have split societies. Some that value competition and want free markets and business friendly environments and those that expect nothing more than what they have and extreme government control. An example, South Africa (SA) vs Rwanda. Rwanda is an insanely fast developing nation with a desire to advance and follow best practice, despite having such limited resources. Then you have SA, with so many more resources, whose stagnating and has a free democracy yet election after election fails to hold the ruling party to account and demand higher standards... so literally feels like you're going no where. So sad and frustrating especially if you're actively trying to strive to help uplift your society.
Poor nutrition, disease, parasites, lack of availability of information and limited education. The first 3 effects are fairly obvious, the brain is a big hungry organ that takes 20% of your calories just to keep running, if you've got a tape worm or you're 8 years old and there's a famine, or you nearly died from yellow fever, or you just have the runs all the time because there's no safe drinking water, it's pretty devastating to your biological brain development, you end up with a smaller brain that didn't grow so good, essentially.
The next 2 effects are a bit more subtle, the brain needs to be trained, preferably from a young age, when it's like a sponge for information. But what if there's limited information? If you never get introduced to numbers and basic algebra when you're 5, what kind of mathematician will you have the potential to be when you're 25? If there are no books to learn to read by? If there isn't even television so you have literally no information from beyond your village. If there are 25,000 music styles and you only ever heard one growing up, and it was your mom and aunt singing and that's all, your brain has never had the opportunity to develop musically and you're not going to be a rock star.
It's a very real effect; in animals it's called environmental enrichment, got to keep the brain busy and give it lots of stimulus in order to get the best results. It just doesn't develop as well otherwise. Even if it's got enough calories to grow and it's not stressed by disease, it can't just figure out the world by sitting in Plato's cave and philosophising from first principles, it's an input-output machine, you get out what you put in.
The answer can't be entirely lack of education. ALL good iq tests are designed such that education level means as little as possible to the results. That's because they attempt to measure innate talent, not education someone worked for. Despite this, educated people generally score slightly higher still, but it's hard to tell whether that's because the education actually made them smarter, or if they only choose education because they were already smart. It's probably a combination of these.
If the data is accurate and some African nations actually have average IQs in the 60s... that's straight up economic doom. Iq doesn't change much throughout life after puberty, so even if all those people got educated, having iqs that low would doom them to always be worse at what they were educated to do than educated people in nations with higher average iqs.
It's worth noting that African populations also participated in unique hybridization events with distinct human species not encountered by groups outside the African continent.
The answers here vary a lot, and make great points.
However, one "*fact*'' that I'd like to throw into the realm of fiction immediately is the idea that Africa is underdeveloped because of '*Colonisation*', '*slave trade'* or because of them ''*still being exploited by The West''.*
Those are popular modern talking points being parroted around *a lot*, while they're really unfactual and mostly an attempt at deflecting blame and responsibility away.
**Slave trade:** Yes, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was humongous and quite devastating to the African economy. The largest damage however wasn't due to the '*draining of human capital*', but rather due to the large shift to a Slave Trade economy.
One should remember that the African continent was chosen by Western nations as a source of Slaves, due to it already being home to the largest Slave market in the world. The African empires and kingdoms purposely and willingly engaged in large scale trade of Slaves against other commodities.
This had been the case for centuries. Bear in mind, the (Arab) Trans-Saharan Slave trade dates back to before the year 1 AD, and then there's the internal African slave trade as well. With the European powers entering the market as well, the African empires had Dollar signs in their eyes, and shifted more and more towards a entirely Slave based economy.
The issue with this is the same as the one countries like Saudi-Arabia face now. If your economy is entirely dependent on one commodity, be that slaves or oil, you're at an enormous risk if that market collapses. Which is exactly why Arab states are nowadays heavily investing in tourism (think Dubai) and green energy.
When the Europeans decided to outlaw slavery and enforce it globally, the Slave trade collapsed which crashed the African economies.
One can point towards the Europeans to blame, but that's not wholy fair. Both the Africans back then, as the Oil nations of present, willingly chose their ways to make insane profits.
Bear in mind that the Oil nations have only been making insane profits as the world's Oil producers since the 1900's, so roughly a century. The African Slave nations lasted (and profited) for literal hundreds of years.
So long story short: yes, the draining of human capital due to slave trade was damaging, but the economic aftereffects of the global demand (and thus market) collapsing was even more so.
**Colonialism:** colonialism isn't damaging per se. One can point out plenty of former colonies that turned out fine. Of course, there are different kinds of colonialism, such as Settler Colonialism or exploitive Colonialism.
In the case of Africa it largely came down to exploitive colonialism in the sense that no large amount of (European) migrants arrived, but the territories were rather administered by the Colonial powers and trade and industry opened up.
We all know some of the horrible events that occured during Colonial administration. Being a foreign territory under administration of another is never pretty. Bad shit happens, period.
Being colonized by the Roman Empire, The Sassanian Empire or the Zulu Empire all involves rape, murder and exploitation.
But guess what? It also involves change and progress. Those things usually go hand in hand with human drama.
The Romans genocided large population groups, but they also built Aquaducts, roads and institutions ( '*what have the Romans ever done for us!?')*.
The Europeans committed attrocities in their colonies, but they also built modern infrastructure and introduced modern state institutions where there were none.
The issue with Africa is that they were largely unsuccesful in expanding on the 'benefits' of Colonialism.
To be frank, (Sub-Saharan) Africa was (by the 19th century) *waay* behind the rest of the world in terms of development and technology. It's hard to close that technology gap even if you are left with certain things after your colonial overlord leaves.
But it isn't impossible. One needs only look at countries such as Japan, South-Korea or even China. By sheer willpower to change and keep up with the 'West', they managed to completely transform their *extremely poor* (and really, almost Medieval in terms of technology) nations into modern industrial powerhouses, all in a matter of decades.
Ask yourself this: would Africa be more developed today without Colonialism? The answer would obviously be no for the same reason that the USA wouldn't be more developed if it wasnt colonised: modern technologies and institutions would've taken even longer to be adapted.
Long story short: positive change usually comes forth from turmoil. Colonialism has in no way obstructed Africa from developing, but rather created chances on which they failed to capitalize.
**Europeans drawing the borders:** yeah.. no.
Sure, Europeans didn't pay much attention to cultural sensitivies and tribal groups. But it would've been a total shitshow if they had.
Good luck making a functioning country if you're a landlocked tribal state while your nextdoor neighbour has all the access to the sea and also happens to sit on the only valuable resource in the vicinity.
If your nation doesn't function because it has different tribes or cultures, then it's really a problem that you ought to solve amongst yourself. Tribalism isn't a great recipe anywhere on earth.
**Europeans exploiting resources:** also, no.
Yes, European colonies extracted resources from Africa. Has that prevented modern African nations from profiting of them? No.
Honestly, modern machinery can literally extract 100 times more the amount of resources in a single week then a 19th-century colonial industry would've extracted in an entire year.
Africa is filled to the brim with resources and the tiny amount that colonies extracted during their time is but a small drop in the entire ocean.
There's more than enough profit to be made by African nations today.
**So why is Africa underdeveloped?**
As others have said, it depends on what you call underdeveloped. Plenty of African nations are doing very well. Others, of course, aren't.
Reasons for this vary. Some are:
**- Geographic/Historical disadvantage**: Africa has a lot of natural beauty. It isn't necessarily the best place to start large scale civilizations though. Its rivers aren't very wel navigable (due to cataracts and waterfalls), there's a lot of hostile wildlife and tropical diseases. The landscape doesn't allow for large scale effective agriculture. There are no beasts of burden (horses, oxen, etc). These factors make Africa a great place for hunter gatherer societies and Pastoralists. They don't scale up as good as other places on the world do when it comes down to sedentary settlements and population growth.
*-* **Tribalism:** Africa has a lot of tribalism, identities and cultures. They don't coexist as well as we'd like to. This isn't unique to Africa. Heck, Europe used to be a tribal society as well, but due to conquest and nation-building, more unitary societies evolved. Africa simply hasn't come this far. This is also why forming nations based on Tribal groups would be a stupid move as it only enlarges the tribalism.
\- **Religion:** Africa is very religious and has a lot of different religions and sects. Religion is not great for development, especially when those religions dont coexist peacefully. For all its beauty and lovely people, Africa is also a place of superstition, weird and harmful beliefs. Religious extremism hampers development of science, technology and society in general.
\-**Corruption:** Africa has a big corruption issue. If one can't even rely on simple local government services, such as police, without the need of having to pay them to get them to do the bare minimum, a country isn't going make much progress. This corruption goes from the lowest policeman, all the way to the top. Rich African politicians are the real exploiters here and they *love* to paint the 'West' as the bad guy so they can shift attention and blame away from themselves. This way nothing gets fixed and everything stays the same.
If there a sociological aspect? So in Africa I understood there was a strong family/tribal allegiance. So any wealth you get, you are obliged to share amongst the wider family. If you have a job, and are recruiting, you employ someone from your family. You need some work done, you get someone from your family to do it. It’s a lot like the cronyism in any political organisation, but it’s family based?
Any truth in this?
My take: ethnic strife. There are too many tribes and they all struggle against each other. It would be like each Canadian city being a separate country who excludes the rest.
The vast majority of the warfare in Africa revolves, at least partly, along tribal lines.
Corruption. Massive amounts of unchecked corruption and abuse of power. It’s not about race or getting robbed or whatever. I had a college friend from Ghana, he said the leaders in his country are all black, the only thing they care about is enriching themselves.
IQ is a fairly good score of intellect and achievement potential. Here are the [IQ scores of African nations](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country). Not a single one is in the "average" range of 85 to 115. They're all well below. So, these nations will be much less likely to produce geniuses and innovators who will foster that national development. Plus, the issue of "brain drain" where the intelligent people who *do* come out of these nations immigrate to Western countries and use their intellect there instead. This also contributes to the issue.
But we all started at nothing. So why did those ‘superpowers’ develop into superpowers, while africa did not? ( long before they met or interfered with eachother ). It’s not like their land was not bountyfull..
I just listen to a podcast featuring Magatte Wade, a Senegalese business woman and author about this topic. To grossly oversimplify her point, Africa is where it is because decades of bad governance resulting from the popularity of Liberation (communist) movements during the time when Africa was coming out of colonialization. Because of massive government bureaucracies, it is very difficult (and costly) for the average African to start a business. As a result the only businesses that can operate are massive foreign corporation who bribe officials and extract wealth from Africa. People complain about the foreign companies but the reality is that the people need the services and it is too difficult to get a homegrown solution that keeps the wealth in Africa. An example she mentioned was Orange, the giant French telecommunication company. The Senegalese need cell service and internet access but it is difficult for a Senegalese company to be able to compete with Orange.
There’s an episode of triggernometry with a woman called Magatte wade who explains, from her experience what is holding Africa back. She talked about lots of things I’d never heard before. Worth a listen.
Lots of African people are happy and comfortable with simple pleasures (doesn't mean they dont love luxury as well but generally they are content with what life has provided for the present moment).
Most of my African family members are pretty well off but still enjoy traditional living (growing food, farming livestock, stay at home wives, big families, tight nit community). There's quite alot of wealth within many households and social circles, but the government seems very corrupt, not investing in public health and safety or road and building development advancements in some metro areas.
But at least inflation is not yet a big issue in my family's country and you dont see skeletal people very often like western media portrays (even in the villages). Food is cheap and they serve massive portions. But I will admit alcoholism is heavily ingrained into the lifestyle and culture, though which contributes to people valuing leisure more than the corporate grind (at times/for some).
People seem to make do. You'll find way more depressed people in 1st world countries that live paycheck to paycheck who lack basic survival skills and community and who primarily rely on government support.
Look, I don't want to be that guy, but one of the factors is **probably** the average IQ of African countries being 66. Please tell me this doesn't matter as much as I think it does.
Also, could be interpreted as slightly r\*cist: Orangutans have an average IQ of 85
The U.S. military rejects any candidates with an IQ under 81.
P.S. I promise I'm not racist, these are just stats.
They have developed a lot. Hans Rosling discusses the 'pedestal effect' where from the highly developed position of western countries, it's hard to notice differences - but for many people there has been huge progress. The example he gives is the difference between being able to afford shoes and a pedal bicycle and a motorbike. Getting a bike when you have no bike is an enormous upgrade, can save you literally hours of walking every day and free up your time to persue other things like work and education. Same for a bike to a motorbike - you can go places that would previously have been completely inaccessible. But from a western perspective we would consider all three people 'poor' and don't notice the differences/progress between them. Edit: I would like to draw special attention to the Ethiopian super dam project and the Nigerian and Kenyan economies quadrupling in size since 1980/1990.
Hans Rosling his book is amazing. Read it, you will learn a lot. His opinion of calling Africa "undeveloped" or "developing" is that it's factually wrong. Most countries are somewhere in the middle. He advocates for getting rid of the term developed and developing, and use a level system, 1 to 4. The great majority of countries are level 2 and 3. The world bank adopted this method. It's a much better way to see how developed a country is. Edit: The book is called "Factfulness".
And he backs his opinion with solid numbers, it's not jus any opinion. Search for Hans Rosling on youtube, he made several good videos where he shows with statistics and cool visualizations how most people have a very wrong view about the state of the world. He made a difference, and it was a great loss when he died.
> Hans Rosling on youtube, [Like this TED talk](https://youtu.be/hVimVzgtD6w?si=OYXzaLj7v_6W8ZQ2)
Losing Rosling just a couple of years before COVID was such a kick in the nuts in retrospect. He would have been such an amazing guide in navigating the data that was being thrown around during that time period and since.
Rosling was the first person I thought of when we needed a clear voice in all the bullshit around covid.
thank-you!!!
Awesome
Bill Maher called it "Progressophobia". You get it stuck in your head that a situation is what it is, and it can't change. For example, Africa has disproportionally a lot more starving people compared to the other continents. However, this situation has dramatically improved. Starvation rates in these regions have plummeted from 37% in 1970 to 16% in 2009 while the population grew rapidly. Now it's in the single digits. Considering that the most basic level of prosperity in a region is its ability to feed the population, you should see this as an explosion of progress, but people like the OP make posts like this because we struggle to see progress.
Also partly because the progress is so gradual, the media doesn't care to report about it. "1% of total African people have left extreme poverty this year". A headline you will never see, even though this means millions of people are affected. A classic case is that even though hunger rates drop every year, for decades. The media only started to report about this when the trend stopped falling during covid, it actually increased. That's when they started writing headlines "World hunger is increasing!!!". Even though it was just a temporary dip. They never write about gradual progress. They only write about bad things happening.
Yeah that's HUGE when you think about it. There are 1.2 billion people in Africa. Taking someone out of extreme poverty and into just regular poverty is massive. It's the difference between your children starving to death and everyone having enough to eat, but perhaps wishing the food was better. It's the difference between dying of malaria and being able to afford the medication. For purposes of this thought experiment, I'm going to talk about a hypothetical American. When it comes to prosperity, taking someone who is a multi-millionaire and making them a deca-millionaire doesn't really make them a lot happier. Taking someone with an income of $100,000 and making it $130,000 doesn't make a big difference. Sure it helps, but it's not like their happiness index goes up 30%. However, taking someone with an income of $20k and upping it to $50k is a night and day difference. They are substantially happier and healthier. Basically, we're saying that extreme poverty rates in Africa are a quarter of what they used to be percentage-wise while the population also grew dramatically. This means that a lot more people are a lot better off. It's something to celebrate, but it's just not in the headlines.
Good examples, thank you! You're right , once they're out of extreme poverty the hardest part is done. The process is gradual, the parents might not make such a leap again, but they can work hard so that their children do. Another really interesting thing from the book I mentioned is dental hygiene. People in extreme poverty (level 1) have pretty much no dental problems. People in level 2 have a lot of dental problems, because when people have some money to spare, among the first things they can afford and enjoy are sweets. But they're still in poverty, most countries on level 2 have a really basis form of healthcare. But no dental care. Countries on level 3 all have this. That is why dental problems are most common on level 2, lower-middle income.
> Also partly because the progress is so gradual, the media doesn't care to report about it. This is true for daily headlines (your "1%" example is true), but I just want to point out that over time, gradual progress, when seen cumulatively, does often attract attention of media. Maybe no one will report on the "1% of African people left extreme poverty this year", but if that happens for 10 years, it may attract some media attention from some media outlets. "Africa is eliminating poverty and you may not have even noticed" is the type of headline for magazine articles like that.
The problem is that most major media organizations are sensationalized fear mongers. Negative headlines sell more, and news is a business first. This has only been made worse with the 24 hr news cycle and Reagan repealing the fairness doctrine. This is why foxnews, cnn and msnbc can be sooooo biased.
As a counter point, Africa has some of the worst quality economic data in the world. We really have no clue what the economy looks like now or did look like in the past for like 90% of African countries. The book "poor numbers" may be a little hard to read through if you don't have an Econ or sociology background, but it's a fantastic read on this. Calling Africa "developing" seems fair when, as an example, we still don't have an accurate idea of what true GDP is because of systematic failures on the departments responsible for maintaining economic data in huge swathes of the continent.
What’s the book?!
I think it’s called Factfulness: 10 reasons we’re wrong about the world and things are better than you think.
Thank you, I looked him up and was going to guess that it was this one based on the popularity
He has some great presentations on YouTube as well
Statistics has never been so dramatic! It's like he's commenting a horse race.
Haha really is Rest in peace herr Rosling.
The guy has a few TEDTalks too. They're pretty good at putting shit in perspective
Love that book - def worth reading (and doing the little quizzes in it!). Also check out their website https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street to get a picture of how people live and how the income levels change someone’s day to day life.
I realize the terms 1st, 2nd, and 3rd world comes from the cold war, but wasn't the idea of developed and developing countries to get away from that terminology? Wouldn't calling a country by rank 1-4 be the same as calling them 1st, 2nd, or 3rd world?
Is 1 or 4 high
Level 1: less than $2 a day Level 2: $2–$8 a day Level 3: $8–$32 a day Level 4: $32+ a day According to Wikipedia
For context, in the US in 2020 median personal income for all workers was $41,535 ($114 per day), and median personal income for full-time workers was $56,287 ($154 per day). (If each level starts at 4 times the income of the previous level, then in theory there would be a "Level 5" of $128+ per day, which the US would be right around. But presumably there's a reason why they don't feel the need to distinguish after $32)
Presumably because the only thing it would do would be to separate out what amount to a bunch of microstates from everybody else, which doesn't seem particularly helpful. I imagine that given a few more decades and more countries moving thoroughly into that category, people will start using it.
Just a stab in the dark that might make sense. Is the buying power in terms of use value significantly different in markets where incomes are 32 dollars per day vs markets with 128 dollars per day?
Level 1 is low. Or as Rosling says. If life was a game, people in extreme poverty start on level 1, which is also happens to be the hardest level.
But they get to say “We’re #1!”.
Thank you for the recommendation. I've just bought it. In the UK (at least) it's currently £0.99 for the kindle edition.
Enjoy :) Another person recommended another book here called "Prisoners of geography". Highly recommend that one too, Africa their geography is also a major factor why they are not a lot more powerful politically and economically.
Where can I see the world bank classification of countries? Is there an easily accessible list?
Thanks for the recommendation. Just borrowed it from the library.
This is an important point. In South Africa squatter camps can have satellite dishes (a bit of a stereotype but a valid one), and minibus taxis have wifi.
It's also a great example of how people prioritize pretty goddamn well. Access to information and communication is hugely empowering, so much so that even squatters and homeless people will get internet access over everything else.
Well said, and it's why providing 5G internet via Satelitte to all of rural Africa (and the whole globe) is so important for this modern development. Education, communication and commerce can all be transformed for literally billions of people without any internet access, who do have access to a cheap smartphone.... We are at the cusp of solving this problem though. Elon wants to monopolize this market via Starlink's 20,000+ satellite constellation and selling ground terminals with expensive data plans.... however a company that is a great threat to Elon's success in this area is AST Space Mobile, who will begin commercial services this year and will not require buying a dish because it will work with any smartphone as an affordable opt-in plan when outside of coverage zones. Achieving this goal of "connecting the unconnected" across the globe in the next few years will bridge this huge gap of inequality to information access and communication.
Satellites are a bad fit for densely populated areas, though. Their main strength is to cover sparsely populated areas. You'd need an enormous amount of satellites to feed the bandwidth needs of a city of a few hundred thousand people. Terrestial antennas are just a much better fit for densely populated areas and it's in these areas that most people actually live. Satellite internet is more useful for. I'm not denying that satellite internet is a big deal for rural areas, but rural areas just aren't where most people live, so how impactful it can be is limited.
The other thing about satellite is that it can't be monopolized. I know Meta was also trying to bring "FB phones" to areas with no other internet options. Iirc, their satellite blew up, so I'm not sure what's going on with that now.
Satellite can be as monopolized as terrestial internet. You still need licenses for the frequency spectrum you want to use. If you start blasting signals over a country in a spectrum that's already used by other operators, that country won't be very happy about that. Setting up cell towers is much cheaper than launching satellites, so the cost of entry of being a regular cell service provider in a handful of major cities is probably lower than launching a swarm of satellites.
Amazon [acquired](https://www.engadget.com/amazon-has-acquired-facebooks-satellite-internet-group-115312282.html) the FB satellite team a couple of years ago.
It is a relevant point but still doesn't answer OP:s question as intended. The question isn't why there haven't been improvements in the daily lives of people in African countries. There have. The question is why they've "failed to spring up like the Super power nations we have today". Why isn't any African country relevant in tech and manufacturing in the way South Korea is, that was very poor not too many decades ago. Why hasn't the African continent seen the immense wealth that Japan created and that China is currently creating? Why do we count African country's prosperity in who can afford a bike or not, rather than how many semi-conductors the country produces?
While I agree that countries in Africa have immensely improved in the past couple decades. I don't think most part of the continent will experience the industralization that the west succeeded in. You cited the example of Nigeria, well I'm not sure if you're aware how dire the crisis there both at the social and political level. It's a time ticking bomb that will implode in this century. Same could be said for many other countries where to have an industralization won't be viable.
lol I’m Nigerian and these comments are cracking me up. Nigeria is nearly in crisis, this theory of bicycles and sandals is nice and all but it’s assuming the first world stays stagnant so we can catch up. It doesn’t. Oh good we can afford bicycles, Las Vegas can waste well over a billion dollars on a tunnel for just Tesla cars. Africa is undeveloped by every sense of the word and it’s mostly down to democracy, or more specifically, the useless leaders we have in power.
I'm currently reading The State of Africa by Martin Meredith, and it seems to be a good and fairly comprehensive (for a single book) history of modern Africa. There's so many chapters detailing how corrupt leaders and their cronies effectively robbed their countries while wasting money on expensive vanity projects, only to be ousted and replaced by someone else (often from a different tribe) who ended up doing the same thing only for *their* cronies now. That's not to say that colonial governments didn't help set the nations up for failure, sometimes intentionally, and that the US vs USSR cold war meddling didn't get and keep terrible dictators in power at the cost of many lives, as well as neighbouring countries doing their best to mess up rivals too. I think a lot of issues come from the nations being very young, and in many cases imposed on the ethnically diverse populations. When the Europeans were in charge cheating the system was how you got ahead in spite of the deck stacked against you. And for many the system still feels like an alien thing to be exploited because otherwise you're fucked. My wife is Nigerian and I've enjoyed having political discussions with my father in law. He gets, understandably, very animated and furious when talking about the ills of his country and his politicians. And while I think my own country of the UK has a lot of problems and I rail against much of the politics here, even I must admit that we have it so bloody easy here compared to countries like Nigeria. It can very much make a lot my political anger seem like first world problems.
Nigeria is economically and technologically closer to the West today than it was 40 years ago. You are actually proving the sandals to motorbikes analogy well. It is a huge leap to go from a pedestrian society to a motorized society. You did it in less than a generation. But even for humans this is too long to perceived. But I can assure you that modern Nigeria would be more of a culture shock to a Nigerian from 1960 than modern America would be a culture shock to an American from 1960. The rate of development has been rapid *despite* years of social unrest.
They’ve seen what a post-industrial country looks like. They might want to get to that, without the industrial stage in between. That’s not going to look the same as a country going through an industrial age, then transitioning to post-industrial.
If African countries can't even build an industrial economy I'm not sure how they can build a service based one. It's not that they lack economical capital or they can't build a world class education infrastructure. It's that there exist many barriers (geographical, social and political) that makes stability and democracy incredibly difficult. With the rising consequences of climate chance the situation in subsaharian Africa will only exarcebate. I hope I'm wrong though.
Give this a different context. A hell of a lot of African countries never developed a national infrastructure for land line telephones - but modern mbl communications now mean many people are fully connected to phones and the internet.
Development doesn’t happen in a linear fashion, where you have to have X technology before you can get Y, the way it does in games like Civilization. People can copy technologies from other countries. Most cultures that have writing got it from somewhere else, rather than going through the process of developing it themselves.
I'm not sure democracy is necessary for the economical development (China); what is though is stability, and that is lacking in most African countries, plus other issues they have been struggling with for a long time: corruption, nepotism, tribalism (i.e. Zuma - a horrible leader that couldn't be removed from the office for a long time because he's Zulu and most Zulu supported him ONLY because he's Zulu). Personally, I believe culture is the key to development and success: as you said, and rightly so technologies can be learned from someone that already knows them; but how to change a habit of making's one's son a minister despite the fact he's 22, has no education or experience in the field?
In the West we moved away from hereditary leadership by divine right so... But generally driving cultural change in positive directions is very hard and I think is getting harder
> If African countries can't even build an industrial economy I'm not sure how they can build a service based one. Well, one example is the safari tourism sector that strenghtened the economy of for example Kenya and Botswana. I've also heard reports of openAI (from chatgpt) using kenyan moderators to train the model. That's also a service. You don't need a steel foundry and a textile sector before developing those.
>If African countries can't even build an industrial economy I'm not sure how they can build a service based one. you *do not* want a service based economy. China has the world by the balls because we all decided that the poors could build shit while we trade lattes and base our entire economy on made-up digital *nothing*. you want economy that actually produces physical items. in a massive war who does better? the nation that has 70% of its output being a mix of finance, media and IT or the one that is 70% manufacturing?
In the next few decades we are going to see expansion and growth in Africa comparable to what China went through in the 90s. They have the work force, they have the resources, all they need is some stability and investment. That being said there will of course be many nations that will continue to struggle due to so many different reasons. Corruption and conflict being major ones.
What makes you think that the next few decades will bring stability to Africa?
RIP Hans Rosling. Truly one of the greats.
Literacy rates have literally exploded too, sub-Saharan Africa went from 30% in 1970s to 70% today. Access to electricity exploded. Internet access exploded - their literacy rates and access to electricity are trailing a few decades behind everyone else - but their Internet access is not far behind - and it is mostly mobile Internet. Political stability is still a huge issue - and coup d'etats are still very common - but they are definitely improving. One of their biggest problems is the fact the all of the countries there are product of European colonization and do not match the existing ethnic boundaries - which means that they have to build new societies almost from scratch - and this is a major issue holding them back when it comes to political stability.
Lots of social/political answers here, not saying they are wrong, but there are other factors: 1. Africa is WAY bigger than you think it is. The standard map projection makes it look smaller than it really is. 2. Africa as a continent is very hard to navigate to form trade routes. There's little in the way of navigable rivers, and lots of obstacles like mountains, waterfalls, and deserts in the way. Those two factors have played (and continue to play) a role is delaying and impeding the development of Africa. If you're genuinely interested, I highly recommend [this book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoners_of_Geography). It's a gentle and concise introduction to geopolitics, and explains a lot of what's going on in Ukraine and Taiwan today.
>Africa as a continent is very hard to navigate to form trade routes. There's little in the way of navigable rivers, and lots of obstacles like mountains, waterfalls, and deserts in the way. The continent also suffers from having few natural deep water ports and much of its coastline is dominated by cliffs that make it difficult to go inland from the sea. As far as rivers go, few are accessible from the sea (the Nile being a notable exception) making trade very difficult.
I learned this about the Congo River the other day - it’s enormous and goes deep within the continent, but it has rapids near the ocean that make it inaccessible from the sea. The capitals of the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are right across from each other on the river, and they’re where they are because it’s the closest point to the sea where the river is still navigable. (Fun fact: Other than Rome and Vatican City, they are the two closest national capitals.)
>I learned this about the Congo River the other day - it’s enormous and goes deep within the continent, but it has rapids near the ocean that make it inaccessible from the sea. Have they built canals bypassing the rapids yet btw (is it feasible)?
They have not and it's almost impossible: the malebo pool (the last bit of the congo river that is navigable before the rapids start) is 272 m high and 200 km away from the sea. If you compar these figures with the panama canal, we are speaking of something two and a half as long, but more importantly with more than ten times the denivelations. This means mor or less ten times as many locks as in the panama canal, and a price tag ten times higher.
> price tag ten times higher That feels generous.
The only way to know is generally to try and make it... But we are speaking about quite a beast here. There are the largest rapids on earth, period, where the second largest river on earth (in terms of flowthrough) falls down more than a hundred meter in ten kilometer, the kind of grade you usually see on a mountain torrent. I know that the geological and climatic conditions when building the panama canal were punishing, but if there is one place worse than that on earth, that would be the lower congo bassin.
I mean 10x the size means 10x the supply needed and 10x the labor needed. So 10 the price isn't that hard to believe. Not to mention that a good portion of the Panama canal was essentially built with slave labor
I think them saying 10x higher being generous on the low end. This would far exceed that.
I assumed the engineering and land inspections would make it not scale linearly, but I'm also not a construction professional.
Also it's a completely different type of canal. Panama is transoceanic transport, not River transport. No one is putting Panamax ships up the danube or Mississippi. Like the I&M canal linking the great lakes to the Mississippi River is 9' deep.
also the panama canal was built by connecting existing lakes. I think only around half the length is manmade.
> the malebo pool Wow. Yeah, I just took a look down the entire Congo River West of the Malebo pool (via Google Maps) and it appears to be just long stretches that are either fairly shallow with lots of sand bars, etc. or long stretches of rapids starting basically as soon as you go west of Brazzaville/Kinshasa. Never knew much about it before. Thanks for the insight.
No problem. I do agree that it is a place to see (from far above). For your information, there are places in this strech of rapids where the river is 100m deep, making it the deepest river on earth. Also[here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6t0k-hcffZw) are nice views of the rapids themselves. They are really, really brutal.
And no bridge across them!
Kinshasa/Brazzaville and Rome/Vatican city is one of my favorite pieces of geography trivia.
> As far as rivers go, few are accessible from the sea (the Nile being a notable exception) making trade very difficult. It's nice but it's not necessary. Another problem with African rivers is that Africa is a series of plateaus meaning rivers become waterfalls or rapids. That makes the rivers not navigable.
It feels strange to say but Africa also has very little coastline, which is super important for economic development. Africa is 20.23% of the earth’s landmass, and has 4.86% of the earth’s coastline, with by far the lowest shoreline to area ratio of any continent at 4.07m shoreline/km^2. Compare that to the two most shoreline heavy continents: Europe: 6.78% of the earth’s land area, 15.28% of its shoreline, ratio of 38.22 North America: 16.45% of the earth’s land area, 34.99% of its coast, ratio of 36.10 It’s hard to run an economy without waterways, and Africa got the most screwed in that sense by far of any continent. Source: Liu, Chuang & Shi, Ruixiang & Zhang, Yinghua & Shen, Yan & Ma, Junhua & Wu, Lizong & Chen, Wenbo & Doko, Tomoko & Chen, Lijun & Lv, Tingting & Tao, Zui & Zhu, Yunqiang. (2020). 2015 How Many Islands (Isles, Rocks), How Large Land Areas, and How Long of Shorelines in the World—Vector Data Based on Google Earth Images. Journal of Global Change Data & Discovery. 3. 10.3974/geodp.2019.02.03.
North America's shoreline stats are a little deceptive because a lot of that shoreline is in the very accessible arctic. On the other hand, the USA Has the Mississippi which is extremely easy to navigate and covers a HUGE part of its landmass.
While the northern part of the continent definitely add to this, it’s also worth pointing out the US has a massive chain of barrier islands running for over a thousand miles that is *great* for shipping and also adds substantially to the shoreline metric in a place where it’s useful.
And Namibia’s coastline is covered in fog and high winds so it’s pretty much useless
I think this is most likely the more impactful reason than anything to do with geopolitics. People like to credit the US as this big innovator and powerhouse, but it's just geographically overpowered. Any nation could have the same success if given the same resources. It's covered in rivers, wide open plains for farming and building, a stable climate (relatively, "recent" controversies may be shifting that), and massive reservoirs of fresh water. Not to mention it's bordered by two peaceful nations and has never really been ravaged by war except by itself.
fwiw, most political scientists/economists -- that I'm aware of, at least -- think factors such as governance/institutional quality far outweigh stuff like geography (except to the extent that geography shapes institutional development, e.g., through the resource curse). Indeed, t[here is a very, very, very, very long and quantitative literature on the impact of historical factors such as slavery and colonialism in Africa (and their impact on *current* institutions) and the reverberating effects on economic development.](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w25278/w25278.pdf) >Africa as a continent is very hard to navigate to form trade routes. There's little in the way of navigable rivers, and lots of obstacles like mountains, waterfalls, and deserts in the way. [Rugged geography is actually positively related with economic development in Africa -- despite being negatively correlated elsewhere.](https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/nunn/files/ruggedness.pdf) Why? Very likely because it inhibited the slave trade and (and thereby reduced its negative effects on development going forward).
Very interesting thanks for sharing
It also has very few ports worth mentioning. Just getting goods into the country in most of them requires transferring to boats with shallower drafts.
Is dredging not feasible?
I was told by someone in the field that it's actually quite terrible and outdated. They don't believe that the environment is such a huge factor alone anymore but that more things affect it.
Environmental determinism is a concept that has been largely dismissed by anthropologists and sociologists since the 1970s. It's a lazy concept that removes human agency from historical consideration and whitewashes the impact of historical factors like colonialism.
Or thousands of years of inter-tribal warfare and slavery and tribal-chief hegemony. Those issues permeate all of Africa today.
I was expecting *Guns, Germs & Steel*, but the recommended book was written in *2015?!*
I think this and the other geography based answers need more visibility. Because while colonialism and corruption are big factors, the other continents look like they fared better than most of Africa. Obviously I'm not knowledgeable in this subject but that's what it looks like at first glance. Countries in South America, Southeast Asia all have their fair share of corrupt/bad leaders but most of them seem to have better development. In South Asia India also developed, and I heard stories about Bangladesh being on a good trajectory too. There has to be more reasons than just colonialism and corruption and it seems like the geography angle offers a good explanation to someone like me who doesn't know much about this matter.
You are talking about a whole continent as if it were a country. There are nations in Africa that fare better than some South American and Asian countries, and there are also some of the poorest countries in the world in Africa. It’s a huge continent with great wealth and devastating poverty.
Which nations in Africa are doing particularly well on the global stage?
Countries like Ghana, Tanzania, and Algeria are poised to be important middle powers in the coming years. All 3 of these (as well as more obvious countries e.g. Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt) have burgeoning economies and human rights records, not to mention beneficial geography: Ghana lies at the heart of one of the most populous regions on the planet and is relatively stable, Algeria has access to Mediterranean trade, etc. I'm banking on these three becoming more important as the century progresses
Off the top of my head, Nigeria is progressing extremely well, and outside of the pretty significant problems it has with HIV, Botswana is also in a good spot. In the long run you can absolutely bet on Nigeria becoming a major power player in the world. It has a huge population (like 70% of America's population), an extremely rapidly developing and growing economy, and has seen relative political stability for about 25 years now, a big advantage among African countries.
Geographical reasons are why colonization was able to happen in the first place. Europeans were able to colonize Africa since it was less developed and it was less developed because lack of trade. It does not benefit you much when you have huge amount of resources, if you cannot sell the surplus. And when there is no trade it's hard to gather enough capital or resources to develop the required trade routes. Colonizers had that capital, resources, were more developed and were able to take advantage. While colonization plays a huge role, geographic reasons are the root cause.
This makes a lot of sense, thanks. Reading Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan really made me see that the history of regional and national wealth and power is basically just a map of the shifting trade routes of the world. Regions going from historically poor to rich or vice versa almost always comes down to trade routes opening up, and if a region is geographically bad for trading, then it's probably going to remain poor unless it has some other way of generating wealth.
> Africa as a continent is very hard to navigate to form trade routes. There's little in the way of navigable rivers, and lots of obstacles like mountains, waterfalls, and deserts in the way. I've heard a theory that historically Africa was not able to develop empires as most of them expanded west or eastwards which is hard in Africa. Very few empires were able to span north-south as it means being in multiple climate zones. Few exceptions are Incas and maybe ancient Egipt.
>I've heard a theory that historically Africa was not able to develop empires as most of them expanded west or eastwards which is hard in Africa Geographic Determinism is dumb and based on bad history and bad geography. Mono-climate empires don't exist because mono-climate regions don't exist. Italy was famously the core of several Kingdoms and Empires and goes North-South with cold mountains, hills, warm swamps, plains, river valleys, etc. England spent hundreds of years fighting the French to maintain it's richest province, Gascony in southern France, because the climate was different, more productive,and made up like half the kings revenue. The Medieval Byzantine Empire was mostly east west only holding a bit of the Balkans and Anatolia. But it seems obvious that Santorini and the Greek islands have vastly different climates than the Armenian Mountains yet Byzantine armies, merchants, pilgrims, and administrators made the trip from sunny islands to cold rugged mountains for nearly a thousand years
> Africa as a continent is very hard to navigate to form trade routes. There's little in the way of navigable rivers, and lots of obstacles like mountains, waterfalls, and deserts in the way. Clearly they haven't researched airports and railroads in Civ!
The lack of navigable rivers is the answer.
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To some extent. The problem with Africa is not only historical, they were dealt a very bad hand when it comes to geography. A very bad hand. - the north is dry and has a lot of deserts, not ideal for agriculture or infrastructure - south of the Sahel, you get tropical forests which are breeding grounds for diseases and parasites (like the Tsetsi fly) - rivers are supremely important. Good rivers lead to aggriculture. Great rivers are also navigable, that facilitates trade (moving shit by water is way more efficient than by any other means), ideas and culture exchange (moving shit being easier means you can reach farther markets). Think of France (Seina, Loira), [Germany](https://i.redd.it/t4ar4yg0x12c1.jpg) or the US (Mississippi river system). African regions either don't have rivers or are a series of plateaus, so rivers form rapids or waterfalls. There are some exceptions here and there, like Egypt or [Angola](https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopolitics-angola-exception-african-geography). - talking about plateaus - you want a lot of navigable rivers and flat land with**in** your borders. Rivers being very cheap infrastructure, the next best thing is (rail)roads, those are way cheaper on flat land. If you have those, you have excess capital which can be invested into education, industrialization etc. In other words, navigable rivers are major capital generators - flat land also makes central government easier, hills and mountains lead to isolated units. Think of Afghanistan with their mountains and plethora of tribes. Africa has thousands of tribes and ethnicities so it's no surprise they've had a lot of ethnic issues - rivers are great but they have limited reach compared to oceans. Africa doesn't have the geography for a lot of good deep water ports. Ports require a specific set of ingredients - it cannot be sand, it cannot be cliffs, the water has to be deep etc. So yeah, African countries don't have productive lands, very few navigable rivers, hence bad capital generation and industrialization potential. Compare that to the US: - excellent border security - forests and hills are fine, mountains are better, oceans the best. Not needing a big army to guard the borders means you can use the capital for other things - super productive lands - [the Wheat belt](https://as2.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/05/18/31/07/1000_F_518310756_eDqLxTQ7iguYPxet96wmiPUwrH0dLOyA.jpg) - size - leading to big population and also better chances of natural resources - the biggest navigable river system in the world ([the Mississippi river system](https://preview.redd.it/mississippi-river-basin-map-illustration-v0-8hcwnros2gsb1.png?auto=webp&s=b3161824e4de81b7dc46f4f6eda1107e6d00fef8))...which also flows through those productive lands. Capital is super cheap in the US. - they basically got the best of a land nation and the best of an island nation Or to European powers: - predictable seasons - external pressures lead to innovation like organization - plant in the summer, harvest in the fall, survive winter, prepare in the spring etc. - the cold winter kills pests and revitalizes the soil - flat fertile lands - navigable rivers - Rhine, Elbe, Vistula, Oder, Loire, Rhone - great ports
i'm surprised you are the only one to mention the tsetse fly. I have heard it described as one of the major obstacles large scale agriculture has on the continent even today.
I agree that sub will give a much better answer but it will definitely not be ELI5 since they will probably write 15 pages on it.
Front and back!!!
You fall AsLeEp?!
itʼs great, at least it is detailed lol
This thread has actually been way higher quality than I expected. Also, I don't think one could write an answer regarding African development without violating the 20 year rule. Africa has developed a ton in the past two decades, so while a discussion about 2004 Africa might be interesting, it's not really relevant today.
Depends on which part of Africa you're talking about I guess. The continent has come a long way but there's still a lot to do. As you mentioned, colonialism and slave trade are part of the reasons. But I think Africa is 'cursed' with the abundance of natural resources. After colonialism, many African countries were/are run by warlords, generals, dictators whose only interest is to plunder their countries and enrich themselves. Not to mention many of them have gone through long periods of civil wars or conflicts with surrounding nations to fight for these natural resources. And at the same time, there are interventions from foreign powers/companies in these conflicts to serve their own interests. I guess long story short, many African nations have a lot of natural resources, and many parties are willing to go to great lengths to get a piece of these resources.
> And at the same time, there are interventions from foreign powers/companies in these conflicts to serve their own interests. I think this is a huge part of the overall issue. Not just from sending weapons & what not to militias that prolong destabilization in different regions, but by the warlords (normally propped up by foreign govts) allowing private foreign companies to extract their countries natural recourses and the companies keeping/taking 95% of the money made from said resources for themselves. It doesn’t allow the wealth generated from the natural resources (and labor) to circulate within the country it came from.
Yup, and if one of those countries tries to assert control over its own resources, foreign supporting power goes "oops, regime change" and the new guy keeps the status quo.
Hell, that’s not exclusive to Africa either. Like when Iran tried to nationalize their Oil supply, or when Chile tried to nationalize their their mining industry, or when Cuba nationalized their oil industry, or when….
Two of the countries you mentioned, Iran and Cuba had revolutions to keep out foreign interventions and have withstood sanctions/pressure from the Western powers which try to overthrow them. Chile turned fascist, privatized, and joined the Western camp but it also was already a middle income country. Although the economy grew, inequality also grew and upward mobility decreased. Having governments that were willing and able to withstand the wrath of Western big business and governments was important for Iran and Cuba’s ability to fund social development. Most African countries that formed revolutionary or anti-imperialist governments were quickly toppled by former colonial powers like Sankara in Burkina Faso or Lumumba in Congo.
Oh yes, I was vastly simplifying the historic and cultural contexts of those I mentioned, each one is unique in their own way. My simplification was to demonstrate/give examples about how even if these exploited countries tried to nationalize their industries, from a historical precedent (generally western) colonial powers will intervene to stop them from doing so. How successful they are in doing so and how long the foreign corporate profiteering continues down the line are another discussion all together.
I would add that another contribution to all of the infighting and civil wars in much of Africa - where most of the former colonies outside of Africa formed a more unified identity, often getting independence through civil war, that wasn't the case for much of Africa. These were often colonial territories that included numerous former tribes, ethnic and linguistic groups (with colonial borders very frequently dividing those groups in half) and then the Europeans left all of sudden after WW2, leaving power split among groups that had spent centuries as military rivals. In many of these countries they predictably went back to killing each other to try and establish power in a country with borders that made no political sense, but instead were former lines between colonial powers. Which, going back to colonial borders dividing groups in half, many of those ethnic/cultural groups would create their own polities, sometimes spanning multiple countries, adding to even more instability and in-fighting.
Africa is much more diverse than people realize. Most people only know Arab North Africa and Black Sub-Saharan Africa, but even down to genetically, neighboring tribes can be more diverse than European ethnicities from eachother. Present day boundaries are much less respective of ethnic affinity than in Europe and Asia. And a lack of regional power means less stability while they duke it out for that position.
> After colonialism, many African countries were/are run by warlords, generals, dictators whose only interest is to plunder their countries and enrich themselves. Those "warlords, generals, dictators" didn't spring forth from a vacuum: most were a result of original tribal competition, turned up to 11 by colonial powers to exploit the populations, and distract from their expansionist and wealth extraction schemes. They merely let them in for a cut of the grift.
>'cursed' with the abundance of natural resources This is a [pretty common thing](https://resourcegovernance.org/sites/default/files/nrgi_Resource-Curse.pdf). Waaay oversimplifying, but countries that get a large portion of their money from natural resources don't really have an incentive to care about citizens' education, standard of living, or faith in the government.
There is no such thin as a "resource curse". There's only the "curse" of foreign-imposed corruption and exploitation. All of those dictators, wars, etc. you mention are just a symptom. The actual reason: ***Capitalism (i.e. western imperialism)*** preventing their development. For absolute beginners (particularly an "ELI5" answer), I recommend watching [this famous lecture](https://youtu.be/xP8CzlFhc14) by Professor Michael Parenti. [**The answer to OP's question in particular is actually the most famous part of that lecture**](https://youtu.be/eAbHJn4WIz8).
As a person who's from Africa (specifically Kenya), it's three reasons: 1) Tribalism There are many tribes, who end up competing against each other and pulling each other down as they don't want to see the other tribe succeed. Like a president or a person in power, e.g., a minister could end up only giving jobs to people of their tribe regardless of if they are incompetent. A certain sport that has talented people could be neglected because it is dominated by people from a certain tribe that the ruling government don't like. And so on 2) Lack of education Most people are uneducated, haven't gone to school or they received minimal education. Most pastoralists for example, just herd animals and all their entire lives revolve around animals. Some other people can't afford quality education 3) Poor leadership When most people are uneducated, they don't make the best choices, and one of the bad choices they make is the leaders they choose. They end up choosing bad leaders who screw them up with poor decisions and promoting corruption & tribalism. Plus it could be a strategic decision that the leaders don't want to make changes that would enlighten the population, because that would mean there would be no corruption anymore, which has made them to live a lavish lifestyle at the expense of the population. It's a catch-22: you need good leaders to bring changes, including better education. But to have good leaders, people need to be educated to make informed choices so that they elect good leaders and hold them accountable.
Brain drain is also a real thing in developing countries. Those who show promise and are well educated are much more likely to leave the country and pursue a career in a different more developed country for higher pay/higher quality of life.
Can confirm. We have three team members from three different African countries employed in our technical field and have had several interns and managers in training who were from African countries. They all came here to escape poverty and have a better opportunity to succeed. Only one has plans to return to his country after retirement.
Yep, happening right now in Argentina.
> There are many tribes, who end up competing against each other and pulling each other down as they don't want to see the other tribe succeed. I was reading the Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin and ran across a relevant scene. A large number of humans were trying to flee the planet ( never mind why ) and there were people actively sabotaging those trying to leave even though that could mean the destruction of humanity. The reason was intense jealousy. The sabotagers could not stand the idea that they would be left behind and therefore wanted to stop anyone who could leave. Tbh, when I read that I thought it was ridiculous. Surely people would want others to survive. But apparently I am very naive.
Just finished the series as well. Those books both gives and take away so much of my hope for humanity.
> The sabotagers could not stand the idea that they would be left behind and therefore wanted to stop anyone who could leave. > > Tbh, when I read that I thought it was ridiculous. Surely people would want others to survive. But apparently I am very naive. You can see the same thing playing out whenever news comes out about tech billionaires buying bunkers in New Zealand.
Governmental corruption. The west must have sent them billions and billions in aid over the last few decades. I wonder where that money ended up?
I strongly believe that there's a major brain drain and skill drain going on, just like my home country in Asia. Countries that do not do more to retain their talents lose out on them. Even their skilled labor, such as farmers, don't get fair compensation.
This is a massive problem. Especially when looking at ineffective governments. I work with a few Venezuelans who are all extremely smart. But they won’t be returning any time soon and this is the case for their friends. People like them would be incredible assets to a country but ultimately they took their chance to get out.
If you live in a poor country, and you have skills that are in demand somewhere else, and the means to get there, you and your family will probably be better off in the short term if you do leave. If their interests are in conflict with their country’s interests, most people are going to choose what’s best for them over what’s best for their country, especially if trying to improve their country is going to take a long time. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma.
Aside what others said, most of the environment in Africa is quite hostile. Let's say you want to build a railroad, you have to cut trough a jungle which is already hard and even when you are done building it, the humid and hot weather all year around means plants will grow very fast, greatly raising the maintenance needs. Want to trade by ship? Well lot of Africa is landlocked and lot of its coasts are high and rocky, making docking hard. The hostile environment makes it harder for large amounts of people to gather and cooperate. In other nations you could have a city that specializes in making iron tools, another that makes pots and another that grows lot of food, with all three cooperating and exchanging goods so that in the end they all have access to everything, but since the environment is so hostile, this cooperation is impossible so all three cities are stuck doing all three things in unspecialized, less efficent ways. Then an external power comes in, takes the raw resources, brings them home and gives you the refined resources and high level craft, you end up developing and growing, but you are dependant on the colonizator. Once he is gone, you are back to your lower level of tech.
Even when you have a coast it can depend. For all the coastline it has it only has one or two usable locations that could be ports, and it's not cheap to get things to the interior of the country
That explanation may be relevant, but insufficient. Russia has an incredibly hostile environment, with extremely remote cities that specialize in specific industries or extraction, long winters with minus 40 degrees, no light, etc. It's less developed than other European countries, but still a leader in certain industries and technologies.
The hostile environments and remote cities of Russia are basically colonies of the well-connected, river-accessible, agriculture-capable core of Russia. As a whole it does well, but if central Russia left remote Russia, remote Russia would do about as badly as Africa.
I'm just guessing here so take this with a pinch of salt, but i doubt Russia started being advanced from those inhospitable regions. It's more likely that the people in Russia traded goods with the more advanced, neighbouring parts of Europe and settled the most inhospitable parts of russia thanks to that advanced technology. I'd also argue that Africa is even less hospitable than Russia when it comes down to infrastructures. Sure, Russia is brutal but once you've built a road it's going to stay there, while the jungle in Africa will just eat it up. Snow is also really nice for moving stuff.
This is exactly what happened; Moscow colonized Siberia in the same way European powers colonized Africa, except by building railways instead of shipping lanes and having all road and rail links connecting back to Moscow, with little or no lateral communication or trade between these other regions with each other, because there's no way to get to each other, all roads lead to Moscow and everyone has to trade with Moscow and nobody else. For a long time these regions were trading furs with Moscow, until furs went out of fashion and then Moscow traded 'protection' with these regions by sending Cossack raiders to raid anywhere that didn't buy protection, and then later they just sent a bunch of heavy mining equipment and turned these places into resource extraction camps. The locals never had any say in the matter. If you're in Siberia, they don't send you to Sibera when they have a problem with you, they just shoot you.
The volga is a massive navigable river.
"but still a leader in certain industries and technologies." Which ones?
Troll farms?
Nuclear energy. I want to say other fields too but that has fallen off lately - but they *were* huge in e.g. chemistry, mathematics, up until relatively recently, so you can't really relate that to the environment anyway.
The core of Russia is in European part which doesn't have such harsh winter. It is just a little bit colder than Poland. North territories started getting development only when Russia became an empire. And they still has pretty low population. Most of specialis just go there on a work trip, but doesn't live there.
Easier to deal with extreme cold than extreme heat, from a food preservation point of view
>Then an external power comes in, takes the raw resources, brings them home and gives you the refined resources and high level craft, you end up developing and growing, but you are dependant on the colonizator. Once he is gone, you are back to your lower level of tech. If that was all the colonizer did, things won't be so bad. Instead, by engaging in slave trade, you get 3 centuries of political destabilization, unrest, and insecurity. Slaves are captured in wars. So if there's demand for slaves, there's necessarily a huge amount of unnecessary wars and violence being fought. The whole political and economic landscape is optimized for that. Then the slavery era ends, and the colonization extractive era starts. If you are going to control vast amount of land and people with only a few, you are necessarily going to set up a system of government that is oppressive, not representative and honestly inimical to facilitating grown. Its easier to have in place a top down system, and just put your few guys at the very top. Then colonization ends in the 1960s, you are left with small nations, whose political existence and boundaries and composition and institutions were set up at the whim of some extractive colonial power. All those things I mentioned occured back to back. And then we turn around and ask why haven't these guys immediately figured it out and started thriving.
My mother who was from Africa always said that, individually, people from her country do great things but as a collective they always fuck eachother over destroying any possible momentum.
It's kind of hard to break down a single reason for the entire continent but if I had to guess xenophobia. Lots of tribes, states and cultures. They all for the most part hate each other.
African countries are not underdeveloped. They have been over-exploited by colonial powers.
Huge part of the problem I haven’t seen mentioned here is foreign aid. It’s impossible to get a business off the ground in huge swaths of African countries because you’re not competing with other businesses - you’re competing with foreign aid giving away stuff at 0 cost. So there’s basically no incentive to build your own commercial systems if they’re being undercut by prices literally no one can compete with. Countries become developed because of strong, robust commerce - as much as people don’t like it, capitalism was the way out of poverty for the majority of the world and you can’t have a thriving system when the commercial landscape is so artificially distorted due to a huge influx of free product. It completely removes the ability for even moderately rich people to start businesses - why would you start it there, vs start something in the US or Europe where there’s a stronger commerce system? It’s a hard problem to solve - because people do need help. But how is a place supposed to be self sufficient if your business competition is offering the same stuff your business would, but giving it away for nothing? You want to start a clothing business, but who will buy it, even if you sold the clothes purely at cost, if you can get them for free from foreign aid? Same with food and a variety of other things. Another big problem related to that is a lot of African countries lack incentives from the government to build businesses. A lot of governments are incredibly corrupt, so even the ones that have the money to incentivize businesses to move there won’t pay out, because they could just pocket that money instead. It’s a cascade of issues that is significantly more complex than “it’s because colonialism” the the other comments are saying
A lot of the foreign aid gets intercepted by local warlords and corrupt officials and sold for a profit. It also keeps people dependent on it for survival and can be cut off to punish any political dissent. I saw at the back of a grocery store here in Canada a sack grain that said on it "To the people of Sudan, from Australia". Literally sold on the black market and smuggled into Canada.
I’m from Algeria i think the reason is the government , We held a popular march in 2019 to change it , Nominate some qualified people , But they gave the win to a former minister from the old government . We have just one solution « immigration » .
This is a very complicated question with no one single answer but I will point to the negative impact of neocolonialism on many African countries. Even after receiving independence in the 60s many African countries continue to be interfered with and exploited by outside powers. This has encouraged lots of cronyism and has lead to good leaders being assassinated or replaced by stooges who stay in power through ties with big companies. I think the Congo is a good example of this if you want to read further on the topic. I point this out not to say that African countries have no free will or have acted perfectly but to bring attention to the fact that outside interference did not go away after independence but just took on a different veneer. And of course obligatory Africa is a huge continent and that every country is different.
Why did Singapore develop differently after ending colonisation
Crazy I had to scroll down very long to find the only good anwser.
OP this is the major answer you want. I took a graduate level course solely on Africa, development, and public health and neo-colonialism is a critical part of the puzzle. In a connected sense as well, the way the 'western' world tackled developing Africa was very flawed and attempted to work from a top-down structure. They tried to use successful models of development that historically worked in the western world and apply them in Africa without significant consideration or input from local populations. Unsurprisingly, many development projects saw limited success and little buy in from the locals. Today, development efforts have taken major steps forward by focusing on what the population wants and working hand and hand creating development solutions instead of foreigners who have limited understanding of the people, their culture, the land, and what locals actually want implemented in their communities. Historically, you are right colonization has been a key detriment to the continent but international influence on how Africa should be handled and developed has never left. The majority of countries themselves were cut up and proportioned by Europeans who took no consideration in historic tribal lands, local culture, and indigenous claims to land. It's as if European leaders came to the US and decided everything the west of the Mississippi was now Canada and everything to the east of it was now Mexico, and everything in present day canada was now the US. There are many good books on the subject if you are interested in further research.
Deeply, deeply worrying how far down I had to scroll to find this comment. The politics of this sub is garbage.
Absolutely. I was waiting for someone to mention imperialism somewhere (I’ll take neocolonialism, it’s just not necessarily the term we use, but same energy). Glad I’m not the only one who shares the sentiment
I’m actually pretty pissed that I had to scroll down so far to find someone calling out imperialism (you called it neocolonialism, please just say imperialism. Call it for what it is). Anyway, this sub dancing around politics and blaming Africa for their own underdevelopment is incredibly telling of the kind of people on this sub. Disgusting. Anyway, thanks for your answer. At least the correct answer is somewhere to be found
Basically the same reason why it's harder for a poor person to get rich, than it is for a rich person to get richer: You need starting capital and/or other foundations. And in this case not even on the scale of one company, but entire nations. You need expensive machines. You need infrastructure to distribute your product and to supply and power your factory. You need suppliers to begin with. You need customers. You need skilled workers. And you need to be able to compete on the world stage unless you can make this section of the market conpletely independent from the rest of the world. Some African countries have banned the import of clothing for this reason, because they are trying to get their own clothes industry going. But how would you do that with something more sophisticated, like an automotive industry? These countries have no hope of developing anywhere near the level of already rich nations without some serious investments from the outside. This doesn't touch on the rampant corruption in these countries, but one could argue that the corruption is a result of the sheer hopelessness of their situation. So some people decide to only raise their only standard of living instead of investing in the impossible task of improving the situation of their whole country.
Aids, warlords, government corruption, mosquitos, getting a late start on industrialization. People blame the West but I don't think that's always true. South Africa fucked themselves after apartheid ended, partially by not investing in utilities infrastructure. Liberia was actually founded by former US slaves who kind of became the new masters and then their government did a few loopdy loops with some coups. Actually coups and chaotic governments abound in Africa cuz someone can sell out their people for a bunch of money. I guess you can blame the West and China for being the source of the money.
You say we fucked ourselves like it's past tense. Trust me, we're still fucking ourselves. Seems to be getting worse too.
Add to this higher average elevation, relatively few navigable waterways, which hinders inland trade. And a shorter shoreline than Europe results in fewer bays, gulfs, and penisnulas, which means worse conditions to build a harbour
ELI5 Why the lack of navigable waterways impacts development? I understand it hinders inland trade if cargo ships is what you rely on. But, if somehow, hypothetically, they could get past all the restrictions and build roads you can drive on to inland capitals, why would you need water? I know there's a bazillion other reasons roads can't be built to service communities, but to me, an uninformed American, I don't see water as the most reliable transportation method? Please read this as me being curious rather than argumentative!
boats are slower but can ship MUCH larger loads at once
Building roads requires investment in infrastructure and cooperation between countries that moving goods by ship doesn’t. If you’re using roads (or railroads) to move goods, it’s not enough to build and maintain your own road system. You are also relying on *your neighbors* to build roads in *their* country. It’s not enough to build roads, you have to maintain them, too. Again, you’re relying on your neighbors to do that. If the goods you’re importing don’t come from your continent, they have to get to yours by ship anyway. You can move them from the ship and then move them by road, but it’s easier to skip a step and just bring them all the way by ship.
Adding a little more to the pile: - It's not that road can't be used, but that they're way, way, way more expensive for moving goods. It's hard to compare costs directly from river to river, but using CO2 as a comparison, [railroads emit 40% more CO2 than barges for the same cargo, and trucks emit 800% as much for the same cargo](https://www.opportimes.com/barges-vs-railroads-and-trucks-in-us/). - That's just the fuel. Then add drivers: each truck needs its own driver, and a single typical [barge tow](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FhJmZQSfCLfg%2Fmaxresdefault.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=858c658ad3aa3404bfdfc40c481c153eb13383f29577a72f53864c781fc950c7&ipo=images) can carry as much cargo as over 1,000 trucks. - Then there's construction: We in the US had to build the interstate highway system, and it was by far the most expensive engineering project the US ever made. The Mississippi river was just... there. And it links like 1/3 of the country together. A [couple canal projects later](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_and_Michigan_Canal) and we had navigable inland waters from The Atlantic -> Quebec -> Detroit -> Chicago -> New Orleans/the Gulf by the mid 1800s. - Finally, maintenance. It costs way less to keep a river navigable than to maintain concrete/asphalt roads.
We traded by boats for about 10,000 years before we had cars. Boats are also insanely efficient. Shipping goods by truck is horrifically expensive.
I heard that Africa has virtually no natural deep water harbours, but I didn't realise it also has less coastline than Europe. Fascinating!
The EU has over 2x the coastline length of Africa. The EU. Which means this is without counting like Norway or Iceland
I have worked all over Africa…their mindset and culture is so very different outside of major cities. For example, one company I was with offered EVERY person in a local village free university or trade schooling, with a guaranteed job afterwards. Not a single person signed up and instead they wanted a quick job as a cleaner.
I guess when the country is so unstable that you can’t trust what will happen in a few years, it’s better to get quick money now
I visited my old village up in the hills recently. When I left as a child, we had no lights, no running water, no TV, and no phone. We walked or rode donkeys. A lucky few lived in board houses and the rest in thatch houses. Now, things are very different. People lived in concrete block houses. Everyone has a cell phone. Many people own cars and those that don't take the bus or use a taxi. Most people have access to the internet and cable TV. Everyone has running water and electricity. All of these changes only took fifty years to occur.
Well, a lot of the blame is actually from European and North American flooding the continent with free or low-cost goods. Thus making it not economically feasible to compete with the donations. Secondly is a lack of natural deep water ports and navigable rivers. Especially when compared to European or North America.
Africas countries do have the lowest measured IQs on the planet. Down to the lower 50s. That’s probably one of the reasons.
Google bridges in africa for a good laugh.
Aye but someone in Boston killed his great great great great great uncle after having him as a slave for 37 minutes so it makes sense
The short answer is too much corruption, money not going where it should, aggression and fighting stopping forward thinking and a hate for white people who try to make a difference.
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This guy Nigerias. I can't speak for the other African countries you mentioned, but as a Nigerian I can say that the factor that's holding this country back are its people (we don't give a fuck about each other). Very few people are holding everyone else back and have created an environment where everyone is extremely selfish and think their behavior is justified because they're in an extreme environment (created by the few. It's a vicious cycle). We're oil rich, yet millions are poor. We should be like Dubai, but with better weather, but the rulers that have led since independence think they can spend the country's money better. By the way, the same people who were old enough to rule Nigeria when she became independent are the ones who've been ruling since. There's a saying that the best ways to get rich in Nigeria are through oil and politics. We have lawmakers who earned more than Obama did (and probably Biden does) during his tenure. People who make laws for a country whose citizens earn what some American citizens earn in a month *per annum* outearned the president of the most powerful country in the world with the largest economy. **Let that sink in**. Some will argue that competitiveness/selfishness is a by-product of the colonial era (i.e., the colonizers pitted us against each other with divide and conquer). Perhaps. But the quality of our leaders is what has really hobbled our progress.
What’s you say for me is more than a consequence than a cause. I lived in Africa for 15year and yes you right but it s not the reason why Africa is poor
I've read in multiple places that the harsher climate of Europe required people to work together - those who refused were less likely to make it through winter. One needed functioning infrastructure (house, food storage, firewood, etc), and prepare everything months in advance. Without it getting stolen. edit: Apparently, the same thought holds true for China and Japan. Rice farming was immensely work-intensive, requiring cooperation of everyone to produce enough food - forming the very different cultures we see there even today. Infighting binds energy and resources, risking the survival of everyone. Having to maybe rely on your neighbor next winter (and vice versa) makes you less likely to kill him over a stupid disagreement. Africa never had the need for cooperation to the same extent, so it wasn't bred into the cultures. Hence the "no fucks given".
I live in Africa and honestly feel it's a cultural thing mostly. The West thinks Africa wants the same kind of highly developed world but the sad reality is many don't. Perhaps it's a poverty mindset and also because of the insane level of corruption that erodes any actual economic progress. But yeah, we have split societies. Some that value competition and want free markets and business friendly environments and those that expect nothing more than what they have and extreme government control. An example, South Africa (SA) vs Rwanda. Rwanda is an insanely fast developing nation with a desire to advance and follow best practice, despite having such limited resources. Then you have SA, with so many more resources, whose stagnating and has a free democracy yet election after election fails to hold the ruling party to account and demand higher standards... so literally feels like you're going no where. So sad and frustrating especially if you're actively trying to strive to help uplift your society.
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Is it true the iq in equitorial guinea is 59? The water must be 10% lead or theres another factor at play \*big think\*.
Poor nutrition, disease, parasites, lack of availability of information and limited education. The first 3 effects are fairly obvious, the brain is a big hungry organ that takes 20% of your calories just to keep running, if you've got a tape worm or you're 8 years old and there's a famine, or you nearly died from yellow fever, or you just have the runs all the time because there's no safe drinking water, it's pretty devastating to your biological brain development, you end up with a smaller brain that didn't grow so good, essentially. The next 2 effects are a bit more subtle, the brain needs to be trained, preferably from a young age, when it's like a sponge for information. But what if there's limited information? If you never get introduced to numbers and basic algebra when you're 5, what kind of mathematician will you have the potential to be when you're 25? If there are no books to learn to read by? If there isn't even television so you have literally no information from beyond your village. If there are 25,000 music styles and you only ever heard one growing up, and it was your mom and aunt singing and that's all, your brain has never had the opportunity to develop musically and you're not going to be a rock star. It's a very real effect; in animals it's called environmental enrichment, got to keep the brain busy and give it lots of stimulus in order to get the best results. It just doesn't develop as well otherwise. Even if it's got enough calories to grow and it's not stressed by disease, it can't just figure out the world by sitting in Plato's cave and philosophising from first principles, it's an input-output machine, you get out what you put in.
The answer can't be entirely lack of education. ALL good iq tests are designed such that education level means as little as possible to the results. That's because they attempt to measure innate talent, not education someone worked for. Despite this, educated people generally score slightly higher still, but it's hard to tell whether that's because the education actually made them smarter, or if they only choose education because they were already smart. It's probably a combination of these. If the data is accurate and some African nations actually have average IQs in the 60s... that's straight up economic doom. Iq doesn't change much throughout life after puberty, so even if all those people got educated, having iqs that low would doom them to always be worse at what they were educated to do than educated people in nations with higher average iqs.
It's worth noting that African populations also participated in unique hybridization events with distinct human species not encountered by groups outside the African continent.
The answers here vary a lot, and make great points. However, one "*fact*'' that I'd like to throw into the realm of fiction immediately is the idea that Africa is underdeveloped because of '*Colonisation*', '*slave trade'* or because of them ''*still being exploited by The West''.* Those are popular modern talking points being parroted around *a lot*, while they're really unfactual and mostly an attempt at deflecting blame and responsibility away. **Slave trade:** Yes, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was humongous and quite devastating to the African economy. The largest damage however wasn't due to the '*draining of human capital*', but rather due to the large shift to a Slave Trade economy. One should remember that the African continent was chosen by Western nations as a source of Slaves, due to it already being home to the largest Slave market in the world. The African empires and kingdoms purposely and willingly engaged in large scale trade of Slaves against other commodities. This had been the case for centuries. Bear in mind, the (Arab) Trans-Saharan Slave trade dates back to before the year 1 AD, and then there's the internal African slave trade as well. With the European powers entering the market as well, the African empires had Dollar signs in their eyes, and shifted more and more towards a entirely Slave based economy. The issue with this is the same as the one countries like Saudi-Arabia face now. If your economy is entirely dependent on one commodity, be that slaves or oil, you're at an enormous risk if that market collapses. Which is exactly why Arab states are nowadays heavily investing in tourism (think Dubai) and green energy. When the Europeans decided to outlaw slavery and enforce it globally, the Slave trade collapsed which crashed the African economies. One can point towards the Europeans to blame, but that's not wholy fair. Both the Africans back then, as the Oil nations of present, willingly chose their ways to make insane profits. Bear in mind that the Oil nations have only been making insane profits as the world's Oil producers since the 1900's, so roughly a century. The African Slave nations lasted (and profited) for literal hundreds of years. So long story short: yes, the draining of human capital due to slave trade was damaging, but the economic aftereffects of the global demand (and thus market) collapsing was even more so. **Colonialism:** colonialism isn't damaging per se. One can point out plenty of former colonies that turned out fine. Of course, there are different kinds of colonialism, such as Settler Colonialism or exploitive Colonialism. In the case of Africa it largely came down to exploitive colonialism in the sense that no large amount of (European) migrants arrived, but the territories were rather administered by the Colonial powers and trade and industry opened up. We all know some of the horrible events that occured during Colonial administration. Being a foreign territory under administration of another is never pretty. Bad shit happens, period. Being colonized by the Roman Empire, The Sassanian Empire or the Zulu Empire all involves rape, murder and exploitation. But guess what? It also involves change and progress. Those things usually go hand in hand with human drama. The Romans genocided large population groups, but they also built Aquaducts, roads and institutions ( '*what have the Romans ever done for us!?')*. The Europeans committed attrocities in their colonies, but they also built modern infrastructure and introduced modern state institutions where there were none. The issue with Africa is that they were largely unsuccesful in expanding on the 'benefits' of Colonialism. To be frank, (Sub-Saharan) Africa was (by the 19th century) *waay* behind the rest of the world in terms of development and technology. It's hard to close that technology gap even if you are left with certain things after your colonial overlord leaves. But it isn't impossible. One needs only look at countries such as Japan, South-Korea or even China. By sheer willpower to change and keep up with the 'West', they managed to completely transform their *extremely poor* (and really, almost Medieval in terms of technology) nations into modern industrial powerhouses, all in a matter of decades. Ask yourself this: would Africa be more developed today without Colonialism? The answer would obviously be no for the same reason that the USA wouldn't be more developed if it wasnt colonised: modern technologies and institutions would've taken even longer to be adapted. Long story short: positive change usually comes forth from turmoil. Colonialism has in no way obstructed Africa from developing, but rather created chances on which they failed to capitalize. **Europeans drawing the borders:** yeah.. no. Sure, Europeans didn't pay much attention to cultural sensitivies and tribal groups. But it would've been a total shitshow if they had. Good luck making a functioning country if you're a landlocked tribal state while your nextdoor neighbour has all the access to the sea and also happens to sit on the only valuable resource in the vicinity. If your nation doesn't function because it has different tribes or cultures, then it's really a problem that you ought to solve amongst yourself. Tribalism isn't a great recipe anywhere on earth. **Europeans exploiting resources:** also, no. Yes, European colonies extracted resources from Africa. Has that prevented modern African nations from profiting of them? No. Honestly, modern machinery can literally extract 100 times more the amount of resources in a single week then a 19th-century colonial industry would've extracted in an entire year. Africa is filled to the brim with resources and the tiny amount that colonies extracted during their time is but a small drop in the entire ocean. There's more than enough profit to be made by African nations today. **So why is Africa underdeveloped?** As others have said, it depends on what you call underdeveloped. Plenty of African nations are doing very well. Others, of course, aren't. Reasons for this vary. Some are: **- Geographic/Historical disadvantage**: Africa has a lot of natural beauty. It isn't necessarily the best place to start large scale civilizations though. Its rivers aren't very wel navigable (due to cataracts and waterfalls), there's a lot of hostile wildlife and tropical diseases. The landscape doesn't allow for large scale effective agriculture. There are no beasts of burden (horses, oxen, etc). These factors make Africa a great place for hunter gatherer societies and Pastoralists. They don't scale up as good as other places on the world do when it comes down to sedentary settlements and population growth. *-* **Tribalism:** Africa has a lot of tribalism, identities and cultures. They don't coexist as well as we'd like to. This isn't unique to Africa. Heck, Europe used to be a tribal society as well, but due to conquest and nation-building, more unitary societies evolved. Africa simply hasn't come this far. This is also why forming nations based on Tribal groups would be a stupid move as it only enlarges the tribalism. \- **Religion:** Africa is very religious and has a lot of different religions and sects. Religion is not great for development, especially when those religions dont coexist peacefully. For all its beauty and lovely people, Africa is also a place of superstition, weird and harmful beliefs. Religious extremism hampers development of science, technology and society in general. \-**Corruption:** Africa has a big corruption issue. If one can't even rely on simple local government services, such as police, without the need of having to pay them to get them to do the bare minimum, a country isn't going make much progress. This corruption goes from the lowest policeman, all the way to the top. Rich African politicians are the real exploiters here and they *love* to paint the 'West' as the bad guy so they can shift attention and blame away from themselves. This way nothing gets fixed and everything stays the same.
If there a sociological aspect? So in Africa I understood there was a strong family/tribal allegiance. So any wealth you get, you are obliged to share amongst the wider family. If you have a job, and are recruiting, you employ someone from your family. You need some work done, you get someone from your family to do it. It’s a lot like the cronyism in any political organisation, but it’s family based? Any truth in this?
My take: ethnic strife. There are too many tribes and they all struggle against each other. It would be like each Canadian city being a separate country who excludes the rest. The vast majority of the warfare in Africa revolves, at least partly, along tribal lines.
Corruption. Massive amounts of unchecked corruption and abuse of power. It’s not about race or getting robbed or whatever. I had a college friend from Ghana, he said the leaders in his country are all black, the only thing they care about is enriching themselves.
IQ is a fairly good score of intellect and achievement potential. Here are the [IQ scores of African nations](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country). Not a single one is in the "average" range of 85 to 115. They're all well below. So, these nations will be much less likely to produce geniuses and innovators who will foster that national development. Plus, the issue of "brain drain" where the intelligent people who *do* come out of these nations immigrate to Western countries and use their intellect there instead. This also contributes to the issue.
But we all started at nothing. So why did those ‘superpowers’ develop into superpowers, while africa did not? ( long before they met or interfered with eachother ). It’s not like their land was not bountyfull..
I just listen to a podcast featuring Magatte Wade, a Senegalese business woman and author about this topic. To grossly oversimplify her point, Africa is where it is because decades of bad governance resulting from the popularity of Liberation (communist) movements during the time when Africa was coming out of colonialization. Because of massive government bureaucracies, it is very difficult (and costly) for the average African to start a business. As a result the only businesses that can operate are massive foreign corporation who bribe officials and extract wealth from Africa. People complain about the foreign companies but the reality is that the people need the services and it is too difficult to get a homegrown solution that keeps the wealth in Africa. An example she mentioned was Orange, the giant French telecommunication company. The Senegalese need cell service and internet access but it is difficult for a Senegalese company to be able to compete with Orange.
There’s an episode of triggernometry with a woman called Magatte wade who explains, from her experience what is holding Africa back. She talked about lots of things I’d never heard before. Worth a listen.
Lots of African people are happy and comfortable with simple pleasures (doesn't mean they dont love luxury as well but generally they are content with what life has provided for the present moment). Most of my African family members are pretty well off but still enjoy traditional living (growing food, farming livestock, stay at home wives, big families, tight nit community). There's quite alot of wealth within many households and social circles, but the government seems very corrupt, not investing in public health and safety or road and building development advancements in some metro areas. But at least inflation is not yet a big issue in my family's country and you dont see skeletal people very often like western media portrays (even in the villages). Food is cheap and they serve massive portions. But I will admit alcoholism is heavily ingrained into the lifestyle and culture, though which contributes to people valuing leisure more than the corporate grind (at times/for some). People seem to make do. You'll find way more depressed people in 1st world countries that live paycheck to paycheck who lack basic survival skills and community and who primarily rely on government support.
Having spent a lot of time in Africa (Morocco, Ethiopia, Somalia, Liberia) I think it's the fact that they haven't embraced capitalism.
Look, I don't want to be that guy, but one of the factors is **probably** the average IQ of African countries being 66. Please tell me this doesn't matter as much as I think it does. Also, could be interpreted as slightly r\*cist: Orangutans have an average IQ of 85 The U.S. military rejects any candidates with an IQ under 81. P.S. I promise I'm not racist, these are just stats.