50 years of Development Planning in Africa

At the time of independence, the African states have faced four fundamental challenges:

1.         Firstly, newly independent states needed to instill a national identity and a sense of national unity among the people living in their territories.

2.                  Secondly, the new political leadership was faced with the challenge of addressing the colonial legacy of ‘under-development’ and embedded inequalities in education, health, employment and other aspects of social development.

3.                  The third challenge for newly independent states was to take control of the economy and improve national economic performance.

4.                  Finally, newly independent states were faced with the challenge of ‘state building’ and the need to establish legitimate, viable and effective organizations of governance and development.

The 1950s and 1960s: the development era

Evidence suggests that in the first two decades of independence, African states made significant strides in relation to the four fundamental challenges outlined above.

The 1970s: crisis in development planning

The early 1970s saw a continuation of the gains made in the preceding ten to twenty years but with more attention to the distributional dimensions of development.

1980s: structural adjustment

In the 1980s, a narrow perspective of development as economic growth, best facilitated and distributed through the market mechanism, held sway.

The 1990s: ‘structural adjustment with a human face’

As early as the late 1980s, concerns about poverty equity and the narrow conceptualization of  development in neoliberal thinking resurfaced.

Between 1960 and 2000, African states have been able to make impressive achievements in relation to almost all social development indicators. The attributes of China, India and the Republic of Korea-three of the recently acclaimed major emerging economic power houses and global growth poles in 2000-2010 provide a basis for proposing the imperatives to make Africa a global growth pole. Future growth in the World Economy and in the developing world will depend on harnessing both the productive potential and the untapped consumer demand of the continent. ( AfdB, UNECA and AUC).