Africa's Unseen Renaissance

Moisés Naím / World Energy & Oil

In my years as a magazine editor, I came to expect with reliable regularity a surge of articles celebrating the dawn of Africa’s Renaissance. Time and time again, editorialists and politicians would submit for publication articles announcing and welcoming an alleged African Renaissance—a promised, always just-round-the-corner moment when the continent would throw off the oppressive weight of history and claim its rightful place as a dynamic pole for progress and development. The phrase, it turns out, dates all the way back to the 1940s, when the noted Senegalese intellectual Cheikh Anta Diop proposed that Africa’s future could be built on a rebirth of the civilizational vigor of the ancient Egyptians, just as Europe’s had been built by reclaiming the heritage of the ancient Greeks and Romans. It was recirculated at the turn of this century, as South Africa’s second democratically elected President Thabo Mbeki sought to sum up his vision for the continent. And it continues to crop up now and again when the call goes out for a sunny, optimistic vision of Africa’s future.

This momentous transformation is always heralded, always right around the corner, and always just out of reach. It brings to mind the old, grim joke about how “Brazil has a great future … and it always will!”

A GRADUAL AND UNEVEN PROGRESS
As it happens, Africa’s progress so far this century has been gradual and uneven. It is true that several of the continent’s leading democracies have consolidated in recent years, but it is also true that out of the 52 coups and coup attempts recorded since the year 2010, 43 have been in Africa. Institutional fragility or outright kleptocracy continues to define the Sahel. For every success story like Malawi’s and Zambia’s, whose democracies are on the mend, there is a Sudan—whose nascent democratization was brutally put down by men with guns last year—or Mali, where chronic jihadist violence and state dysfunction overwhelmed France’s attempts at armed peace-making.

Yet, aside from the dreadful pandemic-hit year of 2020, African economies have continued to grow—not spectacularly, but solidly. And growth is no longer concentrated overwhelmingly in resource-rich nations. Remarkably, since the 2008 financial crisis, Africa’s non-oil economies have, as a group, grown faster than its oil exporters. Yet growth rates in both groups are lower now than in the decade leading up to 2008, another sign that Africa’s convergence with the rest of the world will be slow and drawn out, not sudden and dramatic. The continent continues to draw only a very small share of international investment flows, less than 2 percent of the global total. And while extractive industries no longer dominate the investment picture as they once did, the total is not really growing. The major infrastructure development priorities in recent years have mostly originated in China, and they have set off a furious backlash due to the neo-colonial overtones of many projects due to their worrying environmental and social impacts.

MANY LITTLE SUCCESS STORIES
But while big success stories are hard to discern at the macro level, zoom in closer and it’s easy to find many encouraging signs. While the Chinese government’s mega-projects in Africa meet with increasing resistance, many individual Chinese firms are setting up factories and installing cell phone towers in cities all through the continent, bringing badly needed jobs, know-how, and technology. And while major utilities struggle to finance the power plants needed to supply Africa’s urban consumers, down at the grassroots level smaller firms are leapfrogging them into oblivion.

Take M-KOPA, one of the most innovative providers of African solutions to African problems. Rather than waiting for national utilities to get their act together and bring power to the continent’s widely dispersed rural populations, the company sells solar kits you can quickly install yourself to power anything from a couple of lightbulbs and a cell phone charger to a satellite TV setup or a small fridge. Piggybacking on Africa’s well-developed mobile payment infrastructure and internet-of-things technology, M-KOPA provides flexible financing solutions based on daily micropayments for the equipment. Its simplest setups can cost just a few U.S. cents a day, payable through a mobile payment platform. Miss today’s payment and the lights go out tomorrow. Pay again tomorrow, and the lights come on again the day after that. It’s not just a nice idea. M-KOPA now has over a million clients across four different countries, and the company is growing fast.

And M-KOPA is just one example—across the continent, entrepreneurs are hard at work devising innovative solutions adapted to their local contexts across dozens of industries, from agriculture and logistics to fintech and telecommunications.

Maybe, then, the problem is that we’ve been looking for the African Renaissance in all the wrong places. Maybe the African Renaissance will not come from presidential palaces or international investment conferences. Maybe it won’t show up right away in the balance of payments accounts, because it is building slowly, out of sight, in the decisions of thousands of businesspeople making millions of small decisions day after day to solve specific problems. Maybe the African Renaissance is underway, under the radar.