africa

Africa at a Fork in the Road: Taking Off or Disappointment Once Again?
seemingly based on common sense. The result is that public resources, including
aid, appear to be less efficiently spent than one may hope for, as seen from outside.
It is possible, though, to make a clearer statement on why and when aid is unlikely
to be very effective, appealing to basic political and political economy analysis. For
aid to be effective, one needs to have an institutional setting supportive of growth
and poverty reduction. We use institutions here in the sense of North (1991), as
the set of norms, values, and rules that underpin the functioning of the state and
economy. The set of institutions will lead to particular political outcomes (a political
settlement, often an elite bargain) and also a particular nature of state capacity.
For development to take place, a country needs to have a political settlement that
is sufficiently aligned with growth and poverty reduction—that is, it needs an elite
bargain that values these goals, and sufficient state capacity to implement them A
state needs to be both willing and able to act. Most often, aid-effectiveness debates
tend to emphasize state capacity as the “ability to act”—making aid effectiveness a
technocratic issue—and hence “governance” work turns into capacity-building activities.
But this does not go far enough: the elite bargain and the state’s willingness to
act are not only fundamentally interlinked with a state’s technocratic capacity but
also essential for growth and poverty reduction.
And here, we would argue, lies the main development problem of Sub-Saharan
Africa. Even if progress has been made in the outward features of political institutions—such
as more elections or, in some countries, a freer press—there often
remains the fundamental problem that neither politics nor the state are committed
to growth and poverty reduction but are driven by other interests.
As part of its diagnostic work to improve its own aid effectiveness, the United
Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) conducted an analysis
in all of its focus countries in Africa (these include all Anglophone low- and lowermiddle-income
countries, as well as some Lusophone and Francophone countries).
DFID found that only two out of all these countries had a political settlement aligned
with a commitment to growth and poverty reduction, and that at most a handful had
some partial features in this respect. The analysis concluded that the vast majority of
African political settlements only weakly supported broader development. 3 Instead,
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