The fastest path to African prosperity

If you don't put energy and infrastructure first, nothing else will follow. This raises an immediate issue: Western economies are still largely fossil-fuel-reliant and there is no way Africa can start burning fossil fuels at the rate the USA does. Ignoring the pollution and climate aspects, there simply isn't enough fossil fuel production for that scenario.

This means step one - securing the energy needed to support infrastructure and industrialization - must involve a renewable-centric approach, and given that Africa is centered around the equator, that means mainly solar (plus some wind and of course storage). The only country with the capacity to provide solar PV at scale is China, as they've mastered monocrystalline silicon PV production. This is already happening (June 2023):

https://www.pv-tech.org/china-offers-66gw-of-solar-infrastru...

Once the energy infrastucture is in place, everything else follows from that. Water can then be pumped long distances or from aquifers to combat intermittent drought conditions; railroads can be built to move goods long distances efficiently, and factories for conversion of raw materials to manufactured goods for export, aka moving up the value chain, can be built. Similarly, malaria was defeated in the USA because of infrastructure, not by genetically engineered mosquitos or similar schemes - malaria is a solved problem.

This article doesn't even mention the energy issue, it just trots out some revamped version of what, cheap labor in economic zones controlled by foreign investors? And we don't need to educate that labor for the simple tasks they will be given? Listen to this:

> "The belief that increasing educational provision is the key to unlocking prosperity in Africa is therefore incorrect. African economies instead need market opportunities to make use of their abundant human capital..."

I think that used to be called the African slave trade... so what's the author saying, instead of exporting slaves to the West they can just move the sweatshop factories to Africa, now that China is off the table for the neoliberal outsourcing program?

Doesn't that only work if you first ensure that they will be able to use it before it is stolen from them?

Those come after fixing corruption. Roads and energy are important, but a road isn't going to help if bandits take everything you try to move on the road.

Zambia has had almost 100% renewable energy for a very long time. It's only recently with more extreme weather patterns that energy consistency is becoming an issue. We've been exporting electricity for decades.

Despite that the country has remained incredibly poor and continues to circle the drain.

So I'd suggest, "they don't need X they need Y", is always going to be wrong because what is really needed is a blend of everything deployed in a very specific order depending on the country.

I'm from Africa, and left a long time ago.

If you look at Western Europe + the "Anglosphere" ex-colonies, there's a long history of how laws and attitudes evolved in such a way as to virtually guarantee rule of law, individual rights, democracy, property rights, and people doing their jobs with genuine effort and in good faith.

For whatever reason, it's been incredibly deeply ingrained into people here in the West - over millennia - to expect these things from and for themselves.

But in Africa, I don't know why, you just don't have all these ingredients. And so you can give it every resource and all the infrastructure and investment, but I don't think you can easily send the true source of wealth from one society to another one.

It's at least 1000x times easier to do business in North America than in Africa. Instead of getting stymied at every turn by some new idiotic stumbling block, the whole system here pulls in the right direction.

There are lots of metrics that are improving incredibly well for Africa, and maybe this is the start of an upward spiral. I certainly hope so - that continent badly needs a couple of centuries of extreme prosperity growth.