The Livelihood opportunities and wellbeing of majority of Africa’s citizens continue to be awful. African economies continue to face significant challenges. While there has been much progress with economic growth, this has been achieved without significant real positive changes in the lives of millions. Where growth has resulted from a boom in commodity crisis, such as in the oil producing countries, growth has tended to accelerate social and economic inequalities with the poor benefiting little.

Africa’s economies also face severe internal and external challenges. Externally much of Africa faces severe calamities arising from climate change and abuse of ecosystems. As a consequence of the economic turmoil issuing from the global financial crisis, much of Africa faces a depleted export market for its commodities and tourism. Traditional remittances from the west are also in decline. In the immediate future much of Africa’s non-oil producing countries are confronted with a rising energy insecurity resulting from peak oil and historic failure to invest in alternative and renewable energy sources.

Internally much of Africa continues to suffer from low levels of investment in human and physical capital, low density and quality infrastructure, little value addition to manufacturing etc. African economies also continue to suffer from mismanagement, weak policy formulation, and the failure of states to confront the inequality and the vulnerability of the majority of citizens. Many African countries and communities continue to suffer debilitating inequality, poverty and social exclusion. Even in resource rich countries such as Nigeria, Angola and Congo nearly two thirds of the population live in extreme poverty. Much of the wealth generated from these resources is lost to rent-seeking political and economic elites. 

Africa also faces a severe food crisis. This crisis has been caused by a combination of factors that include decades of underinvestment in African agriculture, the impact of Structural Adjustment Policies, and distortions in African agricultural policy that have favoured export commodity crops like tea, coffee, and cocoa at the expense of food production. Government subsidies for agriculture in the industrialized countries of Europe and the Americas continue to make African agriculture unrewarding. In much of Africa, agricultural holdings have undergone rapid fragmentation into small plots, alongside the underutilization, hoarding and banking of large areas of productive land. Continued wars and conflicts, together with poor governance, have resulted in much valuable and arable land and human resources remaining unused. Finally, there has been an inadequate use of appropriate technology in African agriculture, leading to declining productivity.