Africa has a lot of natural resources but has always relied on foreign aid. Nonetheless has famine, poor road network, poor Healthcare etc. Please explain.
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There are whole sections of economics and political science dedicated to this “resource curse”. People have dedicated their entire lives to studying this. It’s not limited to Africa, but countries on every continent around the world.
One explanation (really a bullet point within an explanation) is lots of readily available natural resources= lack of incentive to modernize/innovate in areas unrelated to that available resource. The UAE is working very hard to avoid this with their historical economic dependence on oil. It’s still way too early to know if they’ll succeed. This is just one of many possible explanations.
There are explanations that take that resource curse and extrapolate more such as fuckery from western “more developed” power, historical and cultural cause e.g less nationalism and ethnic diversity and division.
TL;DR: There are no real eli5 answers to this question. People dedicate their lives to studying this but in general, like many other places it starts with colonial fuckery. The European colonial powers pushed and held these places behind for centuries and now to a certain extent China is doing the same.
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