Factors Constraining Development of Africa

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The African continent makes up 6% of the Earth’s surface and 20% of its land mass. Its 54 countries together are home to about one billion people — roughly 14% of the world’s population — and close to 1,000 different languages are spoken across the continent.
Despite this scale, Africa’s contribution to world trade stands at just 1%, and 25 of the world’s poorest countries are located on the continent.
Health crises remain a major burden on the continent: 300 to 500 million Africans are infected with malaria each year, causing 1.5 to 2.7 million deaths — meaning a child dies of malaria in Africa roughly every 45 seconds.
Sub-Saharan Africa is more heavily affected by HIV/AIDS than any other region in the world, accounting for around two-thirds of the global total of people living with HIV. Globally, tuberculosis ranks second only to HIV/AIDS as a cause of adult illness and death, and although Africa holds only 14% of the world’s population, it bears more than a quarter of this global disease burden.
Most African countries depend on so-called “development partners” for 100% financing of development projects, with an estimated 80% of inputs into agriculture, education, and health sourced from abroad.

Factors Constraining Development of Africa

Colonial Rule

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the main wave of European settlement and influence in Africa, driven by interests of wealth, religion, and politics (see: Scramble for Africa).
Many new African states were badly prepared for independence:
- Their frontiers were largely artificial boundaries imposed by European powers, leaving little incentive for different tribes to remain united.
- In most cases, the governments that took over were run by local political elite groups.
Although African countries achieved political emancipation, economic success has eluded most of them — strong trade and economic links with former colonial powers, combined with over-dependence on aid, remain a defining characteristic of most African economies.

Tribal Differences

Most African states contained a number of different tribes that had been held together only by colonial rule and had united temporarily during the nationalist struggle for freedom.
Once the Europeans withdrew, there was little incentive for these tribes to stay together, and loyalty to the tribe was often regarded as more important than loyalty to the new nation.
In countries such as Nigeria, the Congo (Zaire), Burundi, and Rwanda, tribal differences became so intense that they led to civil war.

Economic Problems

Most African states had very little industry — a deliberate colonial policy that confined the colonies to supplying food and raw materials, while manufactured goods were imported from Europe or the USA.
After independence, many economies depended on just one or two export commodities, making them highly vulnerable to global price fluctuations:
- Nigeria, for instance, relied heavily on oil exports.
- In the 1970s, a dramatic fall in world prices of cocoa, copper, coffee, and cotton devastated the incomes of countries such as Ghana and Cameroon (cocoa), Zambia (copper), Mozambique, Egypt, and Sudan (cotton), and Ivory Coast, Zaire, and Ethiopia (coffee).
A shortage of capital and skilled labour, combined with a rapidly growing population, further strained these economies.
Loans from abroad left African nations heavily indebted; as governments concentrated on increasing exports to service these loans, food available for domestic consumption grew scarcer.
- This deepened dependence on Western Europe and the USA for both markets and investment, allowing these powers to exert some control over African governments — a dynamic commonly described as neo-colonialism.
Foreign assistance to Africa has typically not taken the form of industries that create jobs or transfer technology; instead, it has fostered dependence on continuous aid inflows, so Africa has benefited only marginally from its enormous natural resources.

The Cold War

The Second World War brought about two major developments in Africa:
- First, it intensified the struggle for independence and self-determination — soon after the war ended, the wave of independence swept across the continent. However, as these fragile new nations emerged, they found themselves caught up in another struggle: the Cold War between the East and the West.
- Second, the Cold War shaped post-colonial Africa in ways whose effects still linger. This era encouraged authoritarian governments to thrive and dragged economies into crisis as the superpowers wrestled for influence.
Some states suffered direct military intervention from countries that disapproved of governments perceived as too left-wing or under Soviet influence.
- Angola, for example, was invaded by troops from South Africa and Zaire, both of which opposed its Marxist-style government.
Where new governments introduced socialist policies — such as nationalising resources or foreign businesses — or showed any sign of being pro-communist, Western countries often responded by cutting off aid or helping to destabilise the government, as seen in Angola, Mozambique, Zaire, and Jamaica.

Political Problems

African politicians largely lacked experience in operating the parliamentary democratic systems left behind by the Europeans.
Faced with difficult governance challenges, many failed to cope, and governments became increasingly corrupt.
Many African leaders who had taken part in guerrilla campaigns before independence had been influenced by Marxist ideas, which often led them to set up one-party states as the perceived route to progress.
- In states such as Kenya and Tanzania, this model worked well, providing stable and effective government.
- Elsewhere, since it was impossible to oppose such governments through legal means, violence became the only recourse, and military coups to remove unpopular rulers became common — President Nkrumah of Ghana, for example, was removed by the army in 1966 after surviving two assassination attempts.
- Where the army was unable or unwilling to stage a coup, as in Malawi, the one-party system flourished at the expense of freedom and genuine democracy.

Crisis of Leadership

African leadership has often failed to provide the basic necessities for survival — food, shelter, clothing, health, and security — leaving nations dependent on others even for basic needs.

Corruption

Africa’s assets have been squandered over the years through misgovernance and corruption, to the extent that leaders are no longer trusted and citizens no longer see themselves as having a stake in their country’s future.

Lack of Technological Capability

Technological capability refers to the extent to which a country can access, utilise, and create science and technology to solve socio-economic problems; unfortunately, most African countries lack this capability.
Most African countries have failed to restructure their economies since independence and continue to rely on exporting raw materials — cocoa, gold, timber, bauxite, diamonds, manganese, and oil — with little to no value addition.

Education and R&D

Most African countries spend almost nothing on Research and Development; no country has ever developed purely by borrowing to build infrastructure.
Educated Africans often achieve greater success outside the continent, particularly in the United States, where established systems exist to absorb their talent.
- Most African countries lack meaningful development strategies and are therefore unable to identify or absorb the specialists they need for national development.
Compounding this, African intellectuals often fail to unite around solutions to national problems, instead aligning along tribal, political, religious, or other affiliations and pursuing individual interests even where these conflict with the national interest.

Neo-Colonialism

Neo-colonialism refers to the use of capitalism, business globalisation, and cultural imperialism to influence a country in place of direct military or political control — that is, imperialism and hegemony by other means.
Former colonial powers remain involved in the economic and political affairs of decolonised countries, with the United States, as the world’s leading power, widely regarded as the principal neo-colonial political actor.
- France, in particular, continues to interfere extensively in the political affairs of its former African colonies to keep them dependent for its own benefit.
Dependency theory provides the theoretical basis for economic neo-colonialism, proposing that the global economic system comprises wealthy countries at the centre and poor countries at the periphery.
- Under this system, human and natural resources flow from peripheral poor countries to the economies of the wealthy centre, meaning the poverty of peripheral countries results from how they are integrated into the global economic system.
Investment by multinational corporations tends to enrich only a few within underdeveloped countries while causing humanitarian, environmental, and ecological devastation to local populations.
- This fosters unsustainable development and perpetual underdevelopment — a dependency that reduces these countries to reservoirs of cheap labour and raw materials, while restricting their access to the advanced production techniques needed to develop their own economies.
In recent years, China has been accused of neo-colonial practices in Africa:
- Chinese investors have struck deals with African governments to mine natural resources, often bringing in Chinese workers rather than transferring skills to local populations.
- Instances of corruption, labour abuse, and cover-ups have strained relations between Chinese investors and African communities.
To secure a reliable, long-term food supply, the Chinese and South Korean governments, along with powerful multinational corporations from these countries, have acquired exploitation rights over millions of hectares of agricultural land in underdeveloped countries.

Lack of Faith and Confidence

There is a widespread loss of faith in major institutions, including the judiciary and law enforcement agencies.
Traditional values and discipline have eroded alarmingly, with corruption becoming more or less institutionalised and little serious effort made to fight it.
There is also a general disregard for environmental sanitation.
Many Africans lack confidence in their ability to lift themselves out of poverty and instead look to foreigners to solve their problems.
Most Africans see little virtue in working towards their country’s future in the spirit of nation-building, feeling that repeated sacrifices have only left their lives worse off, as governments took these sacrifices for granted.
When leaders fail to achieve meaningful progress, many abandon hope of improving citizens’ lives and instead turn to amassing wealth for themselves, their families, and their associates.