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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How rich a country is, is often defined from a living-standard index of some sort. It depends on very basic needs such as a roof and walls but soon deviates into questions like if you and everyone else have both a washing machine and a dishwasher in your home.
People who “need” both a dishwasher, a washing machine, cold AND hot tap water, heating system in the winter and AC in the summer, one TV on each floor and fibre internet tend to forget that the amount of money a western family with two kids spends on smartphones and cellular service in a regular year corresponds well to a good enough yearly salary in some poorer countries.
It also naturally means that the industrialisation and mining endeavours that happens there, is often backed by foreign money. Money that, to be blunt, comes there because the salaries are low.
In that symbiosis, no-one – and this includes the countrys leadership, for reasons – is really that keen on increasing living standards to the point where the salaries match the salaries in other countries, because it would potentially make the whole mining business move elsewhere.
The realisation that helping your population to get better salaries COULD be a way to make them unemployed…probably stops a lot of natural salary increase curves from happening.
Healthcare and road standards are all things that are typically financed by taxes. Taxes that…may not be that ethical to extract if people can barely survive on their salaries in the first place. And even if you do have a functional tax extraction system AND willingness to pay taxes…you may not get the money you need to bridge long distances of little interest with roads that makes it easy and neat to travel between two cities, just to encourage that travel.
Good roads is a luxury item. You can do without it if you have to. Healthcare is a luxury item, you can get by without it if you don’t have a choice (well, until you cannot) and so on.
We take schools for granted. Analfabetism is definitely a thing on that continent, which ALSO contributes to the lower standards, but from the other direction: people who cannot read and write are often not that well aware of their rights or their possibilities.
Besides that, colonisation, pillaging, slave trade and all that that “we” put that contingent through, have given them setbacks.
The huge palette of languages is one barrier that makes it difficult to co-operate even if you want to.
That the continent has quite a few really old feuds (read: wars) going on that seem to survive on very good oral tradition memories is also problematic.
It also doesn’t help that some regions have lack of something we completely take for granted; water. This very simple, fundamental thing is a necessity for crops, for holding cattle and for quite a lot of cooking. The problematic water shortage also gives the problem that the water that IS available, is often of polluted quality that contributes to health issues, instead of helping with them.
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