Getting Creative About Development
Atlantic Council AFRICA CENTER ISSUE BRIEF Getting Creative About Development SEPTEMBER 2018 AUBREY HRUBY y 2035, sub-Saharan Africa will have more working-age people than the rest of the world combined. African governments col- lectively need to create eighteen million new jobs each year to absorb the large, young, and ambitious population coming to Bworking age.1 But technological advances, combined with the underde- veloped infrastructure of most African nations, mean that the tried and true model of export-oriented industrialization, which allowed the East and Southeast Asian economies to develop very rapidly, is unlikely to produce adequate job creation in the vast majority of African markets. In fact, manufacturing as a share of total economic activity in Africa has stagnated at about 10 percent,2 and—though there are notable excep- tions, such as Ethiopia—the continent as a whole is deindustrializing.3 Agriculture still continues to serve as the backbone of most African economies, with over 70 percent of Africans earning a living in that sector.4 But as Africa urbanizes, the composition of economic activity is rap- idly changing, shifting away from agriculture and towards the services sector. In 2015, services accounted for 58 percent of sub-Saharan GDP (up from 47 percent in 2005).5 More significantly, 33 percent of African 1 Céline Allard et al., Regional Economic Outlook: sub-Saharan Africa 2015, Internation- al Monetary Fund, April 2015, https://www.imf.org/~/media/Websites/IMF/import- ed-flagship-issues/external/pubs/ft/reo/2015/afr/eng/pdf/_sreo0415pdf.ashx. 2 Brahima Sangafowa Coulibaly, “Africa’s Alternative Path to Development,” The Brook- ings Institution, May 3, 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/africas-alterna- tive-path-to-development/.
[Show full text]