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.
In: 2392
Population growing faster than the economy. That’s a contemporary problem.
Africans kingdoms used to be organized around selling slaves, which limited developments, until European outlawed slavery in most of the world, which was very damaging to African economies.
Corruption, incompetence and governments without the best interest of the nation at heart. Colonialism and what not did not cause our current suffering.
All those deals that put Africa at a disadvantage are not forced on it but African leaders take them because there is something in it for them.
Source: l am an native African
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.
To add to several really good answers:
– malaria and other tropical diseases are definitely a factor in parts of sub-saharan Africa.
– lack of navigable rivers and ports. Africa’s coastline is short compared to its area and the rift valley cannot be navigated by boat. This contrasts with Europe which has many large rivers that criss cross the continent and many inlets and natural ports.
– the Sahara desert. The Egyptian civilization centered around the Nile and was blocked from cultural expansion into the continent by the lack of water away from that river.
One theory is: lack of navigable rivers from the ocean, which is necessary for trade/transport of goods, which is necessary for civilizations to branch out and acquire new knowledge/technology.
They have one, the Nile, and the world’s oldest most advanced civilization sprung up there.
One potential factor that I don’t see being told here was the relative lack of domesticated animals. Horses completely transformed the infrastructure of other continents. A zebra may look about the same as a horse, but they cannot be tamed. They will bite onto you and not let go. They kill more zookeepers than any other animal.
I’m a bit amazed this hasn’t been said yet.
Africa historically lagged far behind Europe due to **isolation**, extensive geographic barriers long limited contract among African groups and between them and the larger world.
The end of this isolation by the western powers was only a few hundred years ago, and while technological change can be rapid, cultural change is typically much slower, especially if there is strong resistance to it.
Of course, the colonization period, while it brought massive advancements to Africa, had the issues which are usually associated with conquest.
Somewhat ironically, after the end of western control, the old tribal rivalries quickly sprung back up, producing civil wars in many new countries. Corruption has also plagued them, as attempts to copy western institutions without the cultural underpinnings that make them viable predictably backfire.
TLDR: Africa is poor because it has always been poor, especially when one is comparing it to places that had a 2000 year head start on civilization.
The short answer: geography.
The longer answer: Africa is one of world’s largest landmasses that lacks navigable waterways, with a few key exceptions. It’s not a coincidence that Egypt is one of the few places in Africa where advanced civilization developed- the Egyptians had the Nile, and they had access to the Mediterranean. Of the remaining African rivers that do exist, they are often not easily navigable or they lack year round access. For example, the Congo has several waterfalls and it floods every year to such a point that it creates temporary lakes that are miles in diameter.
If you cannot transport goods by water, you are limited to the far more expensive method of land transport. Land transportation is only suitable for high value goods, such as gold and slaves- which were a major commodity in the trade of various West African kingdoms.
If you have year round water transportation, you can trade your excess crops in a timely manner (before they go bad), you can import goods that you don’t produce yourself (such as steel or spices), and you can build sophisticated trade networks.
Africa is also lacking in valleys, mountain ranges, and other geographic features that are beneficial for development. When clouds carry rain encounter a mountain range, wind currents will usually cause them to be compressed to a point a where they will turn into rain – and a much less dense form of cloud will ascend to a new altitude above the mountains while the mountain range experiences rain.
Mountains also act as a storage by retaining rain water as ice and snow, and the melting of the ice and snow during the summer months is what helps to avoid droughts and keep a river navigable during the hot parts of the year.
When rivers pass through a valley, that valley acts as a natural barrier against flooding and keeps the flow of the river predictable over time. A river that is going over flat land can alter course over time, which is especially disruptive for any sort of trade network or agrarian economy.
Mountains and rivers are also natural defensive lines, allowing a civilization to protect itself from invaders.
The closest geographical analog to Africa is the Asiatic part of Russia.
This is a gross oversimplification of what you see in the modern world but Stability = Prosperity. Even a nation not blessed with natural resources can prosper through tourism and industry if it’s stable. Think Scandinavia, Switzerland, Taiwan, Singapore, Monaco, etc…
When foreign powers colonize another area, certain people and families in that area become friendly with the colonizers and benefit to become rich and powerful while the rest of the people in the area remain poor. This inequality usually stays in place even after the colonizers leave, resulting in certain families continuing to hold all the power and money, which makes it very difficult for true democracy to happen and causes corruption at various levels, meaning that tax money does not go into infrastructure, etc., that would benefit the society as a whole.
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