Another Perspective on Africa
Posted by fazeer on 1 September, 2009
Having lived in the three major colonial nations (and still living in one), I have often been (and still am) confronted with an outdated and highly pessimistic view of Africa. Granted that the bottom billion is to be found mainly in the continent, but there has been much progress that has gone unnoticed. This article in Foreign Policy by Charles Kenny provides a refreshing view of the continent:
More than 63 million Nigerians have cellphones…
About 10 percent of infants die in their first year of life in Africa — still shockingly high, but considerably lower than the European average less than 100 years ago, let alone 800 years past. And about two thirds of Africans are literate — a level achieved in Spain only in the 1920s.
…though there have been all too many humanitarian disasters in the region, the great majority of Africa’s population has been unaffected. The percentage of Africans south of the Sahara who died in wars each year over the last third of the 20th century was about a hundredth of a percent. The average percentage affected by famine over the last 15 years was less than three tenths of a percent. Africa has seen child mortality fall from 26.5 to 15 percent since 1960 and life expectancy increase by 10 years.
Botswana, Mauritius, Tunisia are among the successful African nations leading the way in Africa and are being used as models of development. At the rate at which, say, Mauritius is growing, it is set to overtake some European nations in terms of GDP per capita in the near future (15-20 years). Increasingly it doesn’t make sense to bundle all African countries in the same basket. A significant part of Africa has put war aside and is keen on good governance. There are some failed states where things will stagnate. And the gap between the two is growing fast.
