More Than Humanitarianism: A Strategic U.S. Approach toward Africa

In looking to a better economic future for Africa and its people, we must begin by unflinchingly stating the obvious: the sub-Sahara region has suffered utterly disastrous economic and social performance in recent decades. The economic tragedy that is post-colonial African history, indeed, arguably constitutes the twentieth century’s single greatest developmental failure.

By any number of macroeconomic indictors–per capita income, trade performance, and international debt servicing capacity among them–much of the region has experienced not only stagnation but evident retrogression in the past generation. In more human terms, indicators such as life expectancy at birth and school enrollment or completion rates point to a worsening situation for numerous countries in the contemporary sub-Sahara.

In many ways, modern Africa’s socioeconomic experiences constitute a terrible mystery: we are still at a loss to explain why performance should have been almost universally disappointing in a vast expanse encompassing so many different ethnicities, cultures, histories, and polities.

But we will delude ourselves, and defraud Africa’s future generations, if we cast this profound and complex mystery as a question of foreign aid flows. If sheer volume of official development assistance were the answer to them, Africa’s problems would be solved already: the region, after all, has absorbed the adjusted inflation equivalent of over six Marshall Plans during the course of the post-colonial era.

There is more than a slight chance that economic and social conditions in the sub-Sahara will continue to stagnate–or worsen–well into the coming century. This is the prospect that must capture the attention of persons of goodwill the world over. Such an outcome should be morally unacceptable. Much remains to be done, however, if that prospect is to be averted.

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI.