Last year the continent's overall growth
in GDP exceeded expectations, according
to the IMF's World Economic Outlook, by
clipping along at more than 5%.
Africa, the hopeful outlook
Text: Richard Jürgens
Image: Getty Images
A CONTINENT
Forget the war/disease/misery label that we attach so readily to
Africa, the truth is far more complex... and hopeful. With a
middle class developing fast and a renewed optimism in many
countries, Africa defies easy categorisation and can prove a
profitable place to do business, a fact that Heineken is all too
aware of. Meet the Africa of tomorrow.
It's the neatness and the order on the streets that surprise many visitors.
There is almost no litter anywhere—no plastic bags, no tins, no discarded
margarine tubs, no beer bottles, no abandoned tyres. And while there is
traffic, it is not heavy and drivers move along carefully and within the
speed limit. Pedestrians laugh and shop, or stop for drinks at the local café.
It's a fairly cosmopolitan scene of the kind that you might see anywhere in
the world.
This is Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, a country known in recent times
more for its tragedies than anything else. In the city centre there is very
little sign of the severe civil disturbances of ten years ago. Everywhere, old
crumbling houses are being pulled down to make way for new
development. New office buildings are going up, as well as a number of
large estates of high-quality apartments and townhouses. While the short-
term priority of the Rwandan Patriotic Front-led government is to alleviate
poverty by programmes of rural recapitalisation and repairing or extending
rural infrastructure, it has tabled an ambitious long-term plan to turn the
country into a middle-income economy based on information and
communications technology within twenty years.
Since the end of the Cold War, when the competing superpowers pulled the
plug on the billions of dollars of aid that had flowed to the continent, Afro-
pessimists have pointed to a steady decline in the strength and stability of
most countries south of the Sahara. They cite a statistic that has become as
familiar as the images of war, poverty and disease on our TV screens: of all
the continents in the world, Africa is the only one to have become poorer
since 1960. The "spectre of anarchy" as one commentator put it only ten
years ago, was likely to hover over the continent for some time to come.
Yet the remarkable change occurring in Rwanda is not an isolated
phenomenon in Africa. The rebuilding of Kigali is emblematic of the revival
that so many African countries are enjoying at present; Africa is undergoing
an upturn economically, politically and socially.
For the first time in its history, most Africans are living under the rule of
law in democracies, in fact, the turn toward democracy was one of the
earliest signs of a change of direction for Sub-Saharan Africa generally. In
the short space of five years, between 1990 and 1995, the number of
African countries with citizens going to polls to elect their governments
quadrupled.
As Robert Guest, Africa editor of The Economist sees it, this "sudden
outbreak of peace" in many African countries is one of the main reasons for
the recovery of so much of the continent. While some problem areas
remain, such as the Darfur area of Sudan, for the most part "peace has
brought hope," he writes in The World in 2005.
It has taken time, but most economies of the region have caught a ride on
the back of these political transformations. Last year the continent's overall
growth in GDP exceeded expectations, according to the IMF's World
Economic Outlook, by clipping along at more than 5%. The main reasons for
this positive development were global expansion through higher demand
and higher prices for commodities, more aid, and greater macroeconomic
stability, according to a report this year by the African Development Bank
and the OECD Development Centre.
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