Africa: The Bottlenecks Strangling Development

Africa's development requires more action than words. Since the independence of most of the continent's countries in the 1960s, there has been no shortage of summits, international meetings, forums, diagnoses, analyses and reports documenting the bottlenecks strangling the continent's development. But the programs and projects implemented in this perspective to bring about the necessary correctives are often crowned with failure because their design and implementation do not necessarily respond to the continent's challenges as established by the analyses. The question of industrialization, for example, has always been indexed, but has never been sufficiently resolved to have the necessary impact on African economies. A number of factors are behind Africa's underdevelopment and the fact that it does not carry much weight in the global economy. This article looks at the bottlenecks that are strangling Africa, between lack of industrialization, poor governance and insufficient intra-African cooperation.

Lack of İndustrialization

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) explains that industrialization and development go hand in hand. Almost no country in the world has managed to set in motion a development dynamic without establishing a solid manufacturing base. But for Africa - sometimes referred to as the continent of the future - the fruits of industrialization have often seemed out of reach. Africa remains the least industrialized region in the world. Its contribution to global manufacturing value added is estimated at 1.8% in 2018, a proportion that has fallen since 2014. (UNIDO)

In comparison, East Asia reaches around 25%. (UNECA) Manufacturing's share of African GDP has also declined over the decades. In the early 1980s, it represented over 16%, while in 2018, it was 10.5%. (UNIDO)

In sub-Saharan Africa, this share fell from 13% in 2000 to 10% in 2017, and in North Africa, from 28% to 20% over the same period.

Over the years, Africa has suffered from a crying lack of industry, even though it has vast reserves of raw materials of all kinds. Worse still, the downward trend in the above statistics points to deindustrialization over the years, especially after the decade of the 1980s.

According to UNIDO, the continent stopped progressing in the 1980s, in a political and social context dominated by armed conflict, disease, famine and poor governance. As a result of the debt crisis, ill-conceived structural adjustment policies and the collapse of commodity prices, Africa emerged impoverished from this decade. Most of these problems persisted into the 1990s, and at the dawn of the new millennium The Economist magazine described Africa as “a continent without hope”.

While some countries have managed to emerge from this “despair” to create more hope, the majority of African states still have the same problems they had four decades ago. This is mostly due to poor governance and institutional fragility.

Poor Governance and İnstitutional Fragility

Poor governance in Africa not only causes economic damage, but also makes states vulnerable to exogenous shocks. What's more, the poor governance that characterizes many countries is a brake on investment and economic financing. It creates and sustains corrupt economic systems conducive to the embezzlement of public funds and the confiscation of wealth by a small oligarchic political elite. At the 2017 edition of the African Economic Conference (AEC), the diagnosis made clearly stipulated that bad governance has a cost for Africa's economic stability, and to sustainably meet this challenge would require “a break with bad practices that undermine the quality of economic results”.

“Despite the economic progress made in recent years, governance remains a serious problem in Africa (...). For example, bad governance leads to bad elections, which in turn weaken institutions, particularly the judiciary, and hinder equal opportunities in Africa. With its enormous potential, the region could have been one of the most prosperous on the planet”.

Indeed, poor governance is both the fruit and the driving force behind the maintenance of a certain institutional fragility. In many African countries, the absence of strong institutions reinforces the bottlenecks that prevent the country from eliminating corruption, guaranteeing freedoms and promoting transparency and justice, all of which are necessary for development. In Africa, the will of the people is often confiscated by the will of a single man or a group of men, on whom political choices and the content of institutions depend. These institutions, whether legal or political, are often manipulated to carry out only the will of the executive. This creates a skewed system that fails to engender investor confidence and remains conducive to political tensions and power struggles, which are conducive to political instability and coups d'état, which have recently returned to the fore in Africa.

Insufficient İntra-African Cooperation and Trade

Insufficient intra-African cooperation and trade is a crucial issue for the continent's economic development. Although Africa is rich in natural resources and has significant growth potential, trade between African countries remains well below potential. Countries are still largely unindustrialized, which means they are unable to boost African supply. Several of the continent's countries still have China as their main trading partner - in the case of Senegal, for example - as well as France and the UK. Intra-African trade accounts for a relatively small share of total trade between African countries, fluctuating between 15% and 18% (an improvement since the establishment of the FTAA region, compared with only 14% previously) of total trade according to recent data (compared with around 60% in Europe, 40% in North America and 30% in Asia). This low proportion illustrates the inadequacy of regional economic integration in Africa.

In short, in 2024, the same problems that hindered Africa's development decades ago still persist. While progress has been made in countries such as Botswana, Mauritius, Tanzania etc., much remains to be done. The issue of industrialization is the major point preventing African states not only from increasing their Gross Domestic Product (GDP), but also from having the necessary offers to further intra-African trade. But above all, the question of political stability and the creation of strong institutions remain essential pillars if the continent is to lay the necessary foundations for development.