An economics writer known for his work on Asia turns his eye toward the fastest-growing continent.
Foreign Policy
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As many authors know, book projects often grow out of coincidences, those chance encounters and experiences that stem from one’s upbringing or personal background. Even by these standards, the genesis of How Africa Works by Joe Studwell is a striking story.
On the book’s first page, Studwell declares that he never intended to write on its topic and that it had begun as a mistake. Mistake perhaps, but no ordinary one. As Studwell relates, in 2016, he was invited separately by the governments of Ethiopia and Rwanda to assess their development strategies and present his findings to senior officials. Their interest had been primed by a series of popular and well-received books Studwell had written, dating back to the early 2000s, about economic growth in East Asia (especially China), where he had worked as a business journalist.
The same year he was approached by two of Africa’s fastest-growing countries, Studwell ran into Bill Gates, who was already familiar with his writing. Gates told him, “What I’d really like to know is what you think about Africa.” Studwell says he gave this little thought at the time, but that “two years later, after finishing a doctoral thesis and a bit of reading about Africa, I decided that perhaps I should see if I could say something useful about the continent,” a part of the world he calls “the last great frontier of global development.”
The results are often fascinating and demonstrate a consistently earnest effort to grapple with Africa’s many challenges, but are nonetheless uneven. Readers should not be put off by this statement. A self-assigned task this ambitious invokes numerous daunting challenges, beginning with the significant disadvantage of the author’s limited background in Africa and the sheer size and diversity of the continent, which is made up of countries with vastly different historical backgrounds, economies, and developmental strategies.
On top of these considerations comes the fact that even economists increasingly concede the limits of their field in producing any surefire blueprint for national economic development—never mind one for an entire continent—that can survive contact with the infinite complexities of the real world. But that has not prevented them, or Studwell, for that matter, from working on humanity’s biggest challenges, and nor should it.
More than a hundred people gather on a bridge over a highway, some on the span of the bridge itself, others moving up or down the staircases on either end.
People gather on a pedestrian bridge to celebrate the New Year in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Jan. 1. Ericky Boniphace/AFP via Getty Images
In its opening sections, How Africa Works reflects a bit of the cram course nature of the effort, leaning into much of the best-known scholarship on the continent going back decades. Most of this constitutes Western thinking about the continent as it has evolved from the colonial era to the near-present. These parts of the book have something of the feel of a digest, and in moments, as the author’s gaze shifts from region to region and country to country, the sheer density of factual information in his thumbnail sketches gave me the sensation of reading an almanac or encyclopedia.
Even in these early sections, though, Studwell is doing important work, offering valuable context that will be unfamiliar to readers who have never made a serious study of Africa. And because the continent receives cursory treatment in Western news coverage, education, public policy, and diplomacy, that will simply mean most readers.
Near the start, Studwell presents two fundamentally important facts that are widely known among Africa experts (but generally unknown to the broader public) as the main causes for Africa’s lagging economic development. Many readers of international coverage of the continent will be surprised that Studwell explicitly states that neither corruption nor conflict rank highly among the determining factors.
The first culprit, according to Studwell, is that until recently, the continent suffered from starkly low population density compared with most other parts of the world, due to the twin curses of endemic tropical disease and the half-millennium apocalypse of the slave trade.
The second is that Africa also faced what the author calls “low budget” colonialism at the hands of European powers, which spent next to nothing on education and general-purpose infrastructure while doing little to prepare the continent for independence. When freedom came to Africa beginning in the late 1950s, its rates of illiteracy and innumeracy were lower than any other part of the world.
Studwell also reveals a fundamental reality in these early pages that concerns the future not only of Africa, but of the entire world: Africa’s population density has finally begun catching up. By 2030, it will match Asia’s density in 1960. By the end of this century, he writes, Africa’s long catch-up phase will be completed: Five of the world’s 10 most populous countries will be African, and Asia and Africa together—each with around 4 billion people—will be the world’s dominant demographic blocs.
The demographic picture Studwell presents is refreshingly free of scaremongering, which is common in Western perspectives on Africa. In fact, he largely sees the continent’s fast population growth in the decades ahead as a positive. Over and over, he argues that it may finally help place much of the continent in a position to deepen its development, become much richer, and occupy far more important positions in the global economy.
Studwell establishes his development strategy priors with admirable clarity. He is a fan of the so-called Asian economic model, from which his recommendations to African countries derive directly. According to this model, the pursuit of national welfare and prosperity should begin with the maximization of agricultural output. States that achieve this successfully should then direct investment and entrepreneurial talent toward manufacturing, which produces greater value added than farming.
Finally, states that hope for success in developing mixed economies should exert strict control over their financial systems so that they can do things such as increase national savings, limit capital flight, and provide preferential lending terms to strategic sectors of the economy. Those sectors, Studwell writes, should include firms that export goods, not only because that earns foreign exchange, but because companies that become internationally competitive present an acceptable credit risk and are likely to push for increased efficiencies and technical sophistication.
Even with a blueprint as simple as this, however, real-world difficulties are not hard to imagine. All governments are subject to the constraints and temptations of politics, and state control or strong influence over the financial system brings with it the serious risk that cronyism trumps rigor in deciding who gains access to lending.
Kagame has his mouth open to speak as he waves to supporters at a campaign rally, surrounded by at least three security officers wearing black uniforms. Kagame wears a red button-down shirt and a baseball cap. Dozens of people are visible behind him, watching through a barricade.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame waves to supporters at a rally in Kigali, Rwanda, on July 12, 2024.Luis Tato/AFP via Getty Images
Studwell’s book moves on to present case studies of African countries that he argues have begun to distinguish themselves from the rest of the continent in terms of economic results. Unfortunately, a number of generalizations leave the reader uncertain as to what lessons could be successfully transferred elsewhere.
His first example is Botswana, South Africa’s landlocked northern neighbor, which has had one of the fastest economic growth rates in the world since independence from Britain in 1966. Botswana has benefited from what might be called the neighborhood effect: By refusing to host South African liberation movements during the apartheid era, Botswana benefited not only from peace and stability but from investment from its much more affluent southern neighbor.
Two other features set the country apart in important ways. As Studwell notes, its population is remarkably lacking in ethnic diversity compared with most of the continent, meaning that its heavy domination by the Tswana group helps avoid deep political divisions along identity lines. At least as importantly, Botswana benefited from the discovery in 1976 of some of the most profitable diamond deposits in the world, accounting for almost a third of global output. Diamond production from mines like these is relatively fiscally legible, meaning that output and revenue are easy to document and hence manage.
Because of this, as Studwell himself writes, “[i]t turned out to not be necessary to strategise economic transformation in Botswana to the extent that was required in resource-deficient East Asian countries.” For this reason, one wonders why the example is in the book at all.
Studwell’s next detailed example is Mauritius, an Indian Ocean island that has experienced great success transitioning from a sugar plantation economy to a site of light and specialized industry, beginning with subcontracting work for Swiss watch manufacturers and further diversification with textiles, fish processing, and financial services.
Yet Mauritius is an island nation of 1.2 million people that measures roughly 65 kilometers long and is nearly 2,000 kilometers from the African mainland. Prior to European colonization, the island was uninhabited. If these details were not enough to strain the relevance of Mauritius to Africa in general, two-thirds of the country’s population is Indian. It also has small but significant minorities of ethnic Chinese and descendants of French settlers. Just roughly 30 percent of Mauritians are of African origin.
Studwell defends Mauritius’s inclusion on the basis of what he calls its “fractious ethnic diversity,” and Mauritius certainly associates itself with Africa in continental groups and forums. For economic purposes, though, I beg to differ. Mauritius may be African, but it is as atypical of the continent as they come.
The author’s final two case studies, Ethiopia and Rwanda, bear more scrutiny. Each presents a profile of strong, extended economic growth and development, but upon close examination, these examples also reveal sharp limitations in their applicability to other African states.
After an extended period of warfare, Ethiopia achieved remarkable progress in development under Meles Zenawi’s leadership, which extended from 1991 to 2012. Zenawi, who had originally trained as a doctor, became a devotee of economics, pursuing a graduate degree even after taking power and studying the tremendous postwar success of South Korea for lessons he could apply in Ethiopia.
His seriousness and determination quickly impressed foreign leaders and experts in development agencies such as the World Bank, like Joseph Stiglitz, who began advocating for him within the world of international financial institutions. Ethiopia, which had been one of the poorest countries in the world in the early 1990s, rose quickly under Meles. As in Studwell’s East Asian model, this began with agricultural performance. Extension services and microfinance were provided to peasant farmers. New road networks were built. And from 2004, average cereal yields increased 5 percent annually. Soon, extreme poverty plummeted and the average life expectancy soared. As I witnessed in researching a book on the Chinese presence in Africa, Ethiopia then began turning to manufacturing, creating industrial zones that welcomed foreign investment. Most of these were Chinese operated. The Financial Times referred to the country and its success as the “miracle on the Nile.”
In East Asia, as in Africa, Studwell argues that results like these usually become possible only when governments can build strong development coalitions. Meles seems to have done this, but his was also a system that gave disproportionate power to his own relatively small ethnic minority, the Tigrayans, and centered heavily on his own personality. When Meles died in 2012, this left a vacuum, and Ethiopia has lurched from crisis to crisis, including the return of armed conflict, ever since. Ethiopia has sustained remarkably rapid economic growth despite this turbulence, but the next war never seems far off. This is, in part, due to a feature of Ethiopian history that sets it off markedly from most other African countries: The modern Ethiopian state was built on the rocky foundations of an old empire, whose hold over the entire country has long been shifting and tenuous.
Studwell’s final example is Rwanda, a tiny, landlocked former Belgian colony that was the scene of an ethnic genocide in 1994. Under Paul Kagame, who has ruled ever since, Rwanda has grown fast, averaging 7.8 percent average annual GDP growth between 2000 and 2019. Studwell writes, “What attracted Kagame was the Singapore model — its no nonsense, cleanliness-obsessed, somewhat thuggish prime minister of thirty-one years, Lee Kuan Yew, and Lee’s People’s Action Party (PAP), which cut the legs from under political opponents while co-opting the best talent in Singapore to work for the PAP and for the government.”
Kagame has done much more than figuratively dismembering opponents. He operates something far more centralized than even Meles and has brooked no criticism while behaving ruthlessly. This has included instituting a highly effective and intimidating surveillance state and even kidnapping and murdering “enemies” of his regime abroad.
Despite this, the economic performance of Kagame’s Rwanda has won him many fans in Africa. Admirers have told me they would trade the formalized but often corrupt and economically ineffective democracies in their countries for a regime of strictly limited rights under an enlightened dictator, as they perceive Kagame. African dictatorships in general have fared poorly, though. And the Ethiopian example should be cause for additional caution. The centralization of power to such an extent inevitably weakens institutions. When Kagame leaves the scene, as every leader eventually must, there will be a tremendous vacuum. This will bring a heightened risk of violence and political disarray, placing many of Rwanda’s economic gains in danger.
There are other important reasons Rwanda offers no constructive paradigm for other African countries. The first is the previously invoked neighborhood effect. Rwanda has long used military force and militia proxies to control vast, mineral-rich expanses of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and thus extract its neighbor’s vital wealth. Remarkably, as Kagame has done this, his country has “received more aid per capita than almost any other African state.” In other words, it has benefited from resource flows that most African countries could only dream of.
Two people haul sacks of food over their heads as they unload it from the open back of a transport truck, which is parked in a sandy lanscape beneath a partly cloudy sky.
Food aid arrives at a camp for Sudanese refugees in Oure Cassoni, Chad, on Feb. 24.Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Where I found How Africa Works most illuminating was in two areas unrelated to these country-by-country surveys: its healthy skepticism toward Western development assistance, and its cautiously optimistic view of the African future.
Studwell shows remarkable deftness in simultaneously arguing that the often-heard claim that aid is a waste of money is baseless, while showing that Western approaches to African assistance (particularly bilateral ones) have been historically fickle and sometimes even pointlessly meanspirited.
Critics often imagine that African countries have become wards of the international system. Studwell resists the common Western temptation to overstate the overall importance of foreign assistance to the economic fortunes of most of the continent. At the same time, he writes, since 2000, “the share of African children dying before their first birthday” has declined by half, to 4 percent, while the incidence of malaria also decreased by a similar proportion. Both of these markers of progress are closely related to international assistance in health care.
More broadly, he argues, since 2000, there has been an “Africa-wide connection between aid and growth, although growth is not the only objective of aid.” Because of his experience in Asia, this came as no surprise to Studwell. In the post-Mao reform era, China ranked as the World Bank’s biggest recipient of concessional loans, while also benefitting from tremendous amounts of technical assistance. “Long before China,” Studwell adds, “the US gave aid totaling $6 billion to South Korea and $2.4 billion to Taiwan between 1946 and 1978. The sums were so large at the time that US aid accounted for 15 per cent of South Korean GDP in the 1950s and 6 per cent in Taiwan.”
As a longtime writer on Africa, I have often criticized the faddishness of Western aid agencies, whose priorities and advice to poor countries shift dramatically from decade to decade. Accountability seems to be something applicable to others, but never to themselves. Studwell, too, recognizes this pattern. He pointedly likens the Western aid world to a “fashion business” that is “driven by a natural human desire to identify a developmental magic bullet, even though none exists.” This, he adds, “reflects the fact that donors are more responsive to simple, tidy solutions than to the reality that development is complex.”
More problematic is the deep-seated ideological basis of so much Western assistance. Studwell is particularly revealing on this topic:
Across the full range of Western bilateral aid agencies claiming to support agriculture, none entertains land reforms, credit for farmers or support for farmer collectives because of political sensitivity about appearing to endorse ‘left-wing’ agendas. In the case of farmer cooperatives, this is despite the fact that farm inputs and marketing in almost every rich nation depend on collectives that reduce cost and maximise revenues.
Worse still, he argues, the West spurns cooperation with African governments, believing that the solution to bad governance and corruption is to work with nongovernmental organizations. Western aid agencies and multilateral frameworks, such as the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, have routinely put forward strategies “with almost no input from developing nation governments.” One risk of this avoidance, though, is that it can aggravate the problem of weak state capacity.
Some of Studwell’s freshest material comes at the book’s end, where he casts his eye to Africa’s future. What he sees is brighter than what many might imagine, but with no hint of naive optimism.
“Africa is coming on to the world’s radar as never before,” he writes. “In another decade, at 4 per cent growth, the continent’s economy will be half as big again.” As the continent grows, though, he argues that its fortunes will increasingly diverge. “Regions like East Africa and coastal parts of West Africa … will be hubs of growth with populations of hundreds of millions,” he writes. “The landlocked countries of the Sahel, including northern zones of West African states, will struggle with political instability and poverty.”
“Going forward, the rich world will speak not of Africa as a troubled continent, but of parts of it as troubled and parts of it as promising,” Studwell adds. “If you live outside Africa — whether in the Americas, Europe or Asia — Africa is going to be a bigger part of your life. In trade, investment, tourism, literature and music, African integration into the world system is beginning in the way it did for Asia over half a century ago.”
If this is not exactly a blueprint for change, it seems like a well-grounded forecast—and given that Africa will be home to roughly one-third of humanity by century’s end, getting the analysis right matters more now than ever.
