With the exception of a few cities and countries, it seems that many people living in Africa are still in the same poverty they’ve been in for years.
In: Economics
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1. give slight technical advantage to colonists
1. hundreds of years of colonialism – treat entire countries like mines to be plundered.
1. end colonialism < ~100 years ago
1. be surprised that evil systems have managed to leave evil practices and people in place
1. attempt to pour ill conceived aid into countries
1. pretend colonialism (wealth extraction) no longer exists thinly disguised as multinational corporations who ‘help’ extract natural resources.
for a more well educated explanation of the last 60 or so years “Dead Aid” by Dambia Moyo is a good start.
A significant reason is terrible leadership. Corruption and incompetence have destroyed my country – south Africa
One of the big problems is that many European powers came into Africa and carved out territories and formed countries without much regard for what the people who lived there wanted. Time passes and those powers leave for whatever reason (voluntarily or otherwise) but the countries they formed remain.
Said countries are formed of various different tribes, racial groups, and faiths with their own complex and interwoven histories. “Africans” are no more unified in purpose than “Europeans” and predictably many of them just hate each other’s guts. This leads to discrimination and exploitation which in turn leads to institutionalized corruption.
Some people argue that many African countries should break up into smaller territories based on tribal and ideological differences, but again the intervention of Europeans comes into play. By previously establishing large countries incorporating disparate tribes regardless of their personal will to integrate they allowed said groups to intermingle and establish homes. While previously you might have had racially, ideologically, and crucially geographically distinct tribal groups, now they have multiple generations of these different groups all living on the same land. Figuring out who gets to stay and who would leave, how much territory every group got, etc. would be probably even more difficult than overcoming their differences together.
In this environment of barely restrained genocide it is small wonder that relatively new governments have a hard time making everything run smoothly, and the overall economy and industry doesn’t function particularly well. Solving an immense lack of infrastructure and education would be a monumental task even without these underlying hindrances.
The nearly 13 million people that were taken from Africa druing the 400 years of slave trade destablisied large sections of Africa. Then, from 1881 to 1914, the European powers of Spain, Italy, France, Brittain, Germany, Portugal and Belgium started carving up the continent with their colonialism.
They drew borders regardless of religous, cultural or historic backgrounds of people. Then from 1950 to 2011, they alll left the cotinent to fend for itself. And, as humans tend to do and as we have done in Europe and America and every continent occupied by humans, differences led to war, war led to famine, famine led to disease, disease led to instability and instability circled back to war.
Added to the ill effects of colonialism, population growth in most African countries is huge compared to developed countries, so with every generation you have exponentially more people to share limited resources with. Plus huge problems in educational systems, where you have a growing population of young adults with few skills for them to secure jobs. In addition to huge class sizes (like 80 children in the same classroom with only 1 teacher), one of the big issues for education in Africa is that in very few countries people can actually use their native language in education, even on the primary level. So a child speaks exclusively Baoulé / Serer / Mende / Fula / you-name-it with everybody around him all the way up to school age and then once in school, all of a sudden everything’s presented to him/her in English or French, which the child has barely even heard in his life before school. Learning to read in this context is very challenging, as you are effectively learning a foreign language and literacy skills simultaneously. And so it takes a significantly longer time for African children to get functional literacy skills in the colonial language than for their peers in the West to learn to read their native language, and with delayed reading skills, the ability to learn anything else (math, physics, biology, history) gets delayed as well. Of course you have some of the same issues with immigrant populations in the West but in many parts of Africa, the whole population is in the same situation, which then lowers the overall quality of education.
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