africa

Africa at a Fork in the Road: Taking Off or Disappointment Once Again?
Fourth, the availability of reliable low-cost energy will be crucial for irrigation,
transport, and potential agro-processing. The International Finance Corporation
tracks large-scale infrastructure projects around the world and has recently identified
more than 200 around Africa, up from only a handful a few years ago; a large
share are energy projects. To get off the ground, many of the relevant public-private
partnerships will require support for project preparation, public guarantees, and
first-loss instruments, plus commitments to carbon pricing, long-term political risk
insurance, and larger multilateral mechanisms that provide needed levels of public
non-concessional loans.
Fifth, while recognizing that each country’s mix of crop opportunities is unique, a
multi-pronged approach is needed to boost productivity in the domestic staple foods
sector while also encouraging opportunities for farmers to pursue export-oriented
cash crops. This is particularly important in economies where domestic foods are
effectively non-tradable goods, and real wages are significantly affected by the price
of food. Such a multi-pronged approach will likely grow in macroeconomic importance,
too, as new natural resource exporters encounter appreciation pressures
on their real exchange rates. Boosting staple food production to meet aggregate
subsistence needs can free up labor to shift to higher value-added sectors, and can
also promote the price competitiveness of labor, leading to increased opportunities
for growth in manufacturing, as suggested by Gelb and others (2013).
Sixth, to address the strong negative correlation between population growth rates
and growth in agricultural value added per worker, Africa needs enhanced policies
to promote voluntary declines in fertility. The region’s total fertility rate remains
extremely high, at 5.1 as of 2012 (World Bank, 2014). This is more than two births
per woman greater than that of the next highest region, the Middle East and North
Africa, at 2.8. There is no perfect evidence for what will prompt the needed demographic
transition in each country, but it will likely be a combination of efforts to
decrease child mortality, promote girls’ universal access to secondary education,
and make access to family planning available.
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