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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If you’re interested in reading a bit more about it you could try a book called How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney. He explains his beliefs on this subject. Not a hard book to follow, and will most likely give you a different perspective on things if you haven’t read into the subject before.
1. Being late to the industrialization game African countries never got that surplus money from cheap industrial exports to build up their infrastructure. Not having a built up infrastructure makes it more difficult to catch up, because the countries with infrastructure can produce goods much cheaper than the ones without infrastructure.
2. This lack of economic bargaining power means that African countries continue to have poor economies because if you have a strong economy you can force economies that are worse off into trading deals that favor the stronger partner? “But why make a bad trade deal?”, because when the option is bad trade deal or no trade deal it’s still better with a bad trade deal. Bad trade deals means that most of the surplus from the trade deal goes to the guy who is already rich. No trade deal means that your don’t get anything and people starve.
3. The final reason is that raw material export is often a curse. Raw material exports often have very little value added, so it takes a lot of labour to get a little money. Which leads to poor people who don’t have surplus money to spend on anything but the basic necessities. Which means your service economy and educated economy is tiny. Which means that to stay in power you don’t need the political support of a broad majority, you just need the political support of the people who control the guns (because hard manual labour is something you can force people to do. Intellectual labour, less so). Which leads to corruption. Which means that the money you do get is spend to grease the corruption wheels, which means that it’s not spent efficiently to grow the economy.
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Corruption is a huge factor as well, as the other good answers here. Lots of “dictators” and powerful people looking out for “their own people”.
Why build and innovate when you can survive by building a mud hut. In north if you don’t build a house and gather food and resources to heat yourself you’re gonna die
No one explains it like our dear professor yellow Parenti:
TLDW: they’re not underdeveloped, they’re over exploited.
But I’d urge you to watch it. It’s just two minutes and he’s an absolutely incredible speaker.
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Corruption and the partisan rivalries between ethnic groups. As an example, Nigeria has 371 ethnic groups.
Natural resources alone will not make you rich unless you develop the infrastructure needed to extract and export them.
Much of the middle east for example has done this (with copious external help) so they can actually profit from their natural resources. Other countries like Afghanistan and Iran that have not developed their infrastructure as much have also not profited as much from their natural resources.
Another consideration is population. If you have a lot of natural resources and low population, then each person gets bigger individual benefit from those resources. If you have the same amount of resources but way more people, then each person doesn’t really get much.
>Nonetheless has famine, poor road network, poor Healthcare etc. Please explain.
Those are all linked, the road network is inconsistent, so when it’s good, you get a lot of food being transported, and the population increases. Then when it’s bad, suddenly you can no longer transport enough food to feed everyone, and you get a famine. Then people die, the population shrinks a bit, the roads get fixed, and you start a cycle of periodic famines.
Same with healthcare, even if you have foreign doctors providing charity work, you still need a reliable road network to get them in touch with the people who need the healthcare.
So why haven’t African countries developed this infrastructure? Well, infrastructure requires a very stable government to build and maintain, and most African countries simply haven’t had that level of stability. The ones that have (post-genocide Rwanda, Kenya, Egypt and South Africa (sometimes)) also have better infrastructure. And the reasons why their governments are so unstable trace back to colonization and the random borders that were drawn. Unlike Europe and North America, their borders were not created organically through war and local allegiances.
It’s an INCREDIBLY complex topic, one that cannot be completely reduce to an ELi5, but one of the single biggest factors is neo-colonialism. Oversimplified a bit, most nations in the global south, during decolonization, had to agree to allow foreign companies to come in and extract their natural resources, if they wanted to be allowed to participate in the global trading market. The result is an enormous amount of wealth flowing out of the nation, or into the hands of a few controllers, and very little going towards domestic development. Keep this up for decades and you have incredible instability.
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