africa

Africa at a Fork in the Road: Taking Off or Disappointment Once Again?
today have a very different attitude to where funding can be obtained: sometimes
on the public market, sometimes from commercial entities, and sometimes from
individuals.
Part of the reason for this new dynamism in Africa is that debt relief has made
new borrowing possible. When I arrived at the World Bank, I noticed that we were
lending Africa US$5, 6, 8 billion a year, sometimes US$10 billion a year, but that
the Bank’s balance sheet was barely increasing. I discovered that the monies we
were lending were being used to repay ourselves for past loans: there were no
net new funds. That is what led me and Michel Camdessus of the International
Monetary Fund to come up with the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Debt Relief
Initiative (HIPC), to forgive more than US$40 billion of debt over a period of
time, provided that the indebted countries ceased certain activities and that they
developed national poverty reduction strategies that would govern the way the
funds would be spent.
HIPC marked the beginning of a new era for Africa because it allowed money
coming in to be used for the sorts of things that it was intended for, and not used
just to pay old debts back. So as you consider the future of Africa, you can again
look at funding sources as being of material help.
The question then is, What is the Africa that is being supported by these sources
of funds? Is it just Nigeria and five or six other countries? Is it the 49 countries
of Sub-Saharan Africa? What about the three or four places that are currently
engaged in conflict? What about the youth?
The last thing I would say about the big changes taking place in Africa concerns
the blurring of national boundaries. The traditional view of Africa as 53 nation
states is now challenged by technology, with young people connecting by cellular
telephone and the Internet to other young people in a way that was never
possible before. Just as we have seen in Asia and in Europe, the arrival of the
cell phone and communications between young people is overcoming national
boundaries. Young people make up half of Africa’s population. Many of them don’t
care what their nationality is. They want jobs and they see the jobs challenge as
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