A century of economic and technological growth for Africa

The dawn of the African economic boom (which is in place since the 2000s) has been compared to the Chinese economic boom that had emerged in Asia since late 1970's. In 2013, Africa was home to seven of the world's fastest-growing economies.

As of 2016, Nigeria is the biggest economy, followed by South Africa with Egypt economically scrambling and suffering from the recent political turmoil.

Equatorial Guinea possessed Africa's highest GDP per capita albeit allegations of human rights violations. Oil-rich countries such as Algeria, Libya and Gabon, and mineral-rich Botswana emerged among the top economies since the 21st century.

While Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo, potentially among the world's richest nations, have sunk into the list of the world's poorest nations due to pervasive political corruption, warfare and brain drain of workforce.

Botswana remains the site of Africa's longest and one of the world's longest periods of economic boom (1966–1999).

Africa's economy was diverse, driven by extensive trade routes that developed between cities and kingdoms.

Some trade routes were overland; some involved navigating rivers, still others developed around port cities.

Large African empires became wealthy due to their trade networks, for example Ancient Egypt, Nubia, Mali, Songhai, Ashanti, Ghana and the Oyo Empires
Some parts of Africa had close trade relationships with Arab kingdoms, and by the time of the Ottoman Empire. Africans had begun converting to Islam in large numbers.

This development, along with the economic potential in finding a trade route to the Indian Ocean brought the Portuguese to sub-Saharan Africa as an imperial force.

Colonial interests created new industries to feed European appetites for goods such as palm oil, rubber, cotton, precious metals, spices, cash crops other goods, and integrated especially the coastal areas with the Atlantic economy.

The World Bank reports the economy of Sub-Saharan African countries grew at rates that match or surpass global rates.

According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the improvement in the region’s aggregate growth is largely attributable to a recovery in Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa, three of Africa’s largest economies.

The economies of the fastest growing African nations experienced growth significantly above the global average rates. Nonetheless, growth has been dismal, negative or sluggish in some parts of the continent, Many international agencies are increasingly interested in investing in emerging African economies especially as Africa continues to maintain high economic growth.

The rate of return on investment in Africa is currently the highest in the developing world. Debt relief is being addressed by some international institutions in the interests of supporting economic development in Africa.

Trade has driven much of the growth in Africa's economy in the early 21st century. China and India are increasingly important trade partners; 12.5% of Africa's exports are to China, and 4% are to India, which accounts for 5% of China's imports and 8% of India's.

The Group of Five (Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates) are another increasingly important market for Africa's exports.

Africa's economy—with expanding trade, English language skills (official in many Sub-Saharan countries), improving literacy and education, availability of splendid resources and cheaper labour force—is expected to continue to perform better into the future.

Africa will only experience a "demographic dividend" by 2035, when its young and growing labour force will have fewer children and retired people as dependents as a proportion of the population, making it more demographically comparable to the US and Europe.

It is becoming a more educated labour force, with nearly half expected to have some secondary-level education by 2020.

A consumer class is also emerging in Africa and is expected to keep booming. Africa has around “90 million people with household incomes exceeding $5,000”.

Meaning that they can direct more than half of their income towards discretionary spending rather than necessities. This number could reach a projected “128 million by 2020”.

During the President of the United States Barack Obama's visit to Africa in July 2013, he announced a US $7 billion plan to further develop infrastructure and work more intensively with African heads of state.

A new program named Trade Africa, designed to boost trade within the continent as well as between Africa and the U.S., was also unveiled by the retired President Obama.

The lack of infrastructure in many developing countries represents one of the most significant limitations to economic growth and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Infrastructure investments and maintenance can be very expensive, especially in such areas as landlocked, rural and sparsely populated countries in the continent.

It has been argued that infrastructure investments contributed to more than half of Africa's improved growth performance between 1990 and 2005 and increased investment is necessary to maintain growth and tackle poverty.

The returns to investment in infrastructure are very significant, with on average “30–40% returns for telecommunication (ICT) investments, over 40% for electricity generation, and 80% for roads”.

In Africa currently, the source of financing varies significantly across sectors; some sectors are dominated by state spending, others by overseas development aid (ODA) and yet others by private investors.

In irrigation, Sub-Sahara African states represent almost all spending; in transport and energy a majority of investment is state spending; in Information and communication technologies and water supply and sanitation, the private sector represents the majority of capital expenditure.

Overall, aid, the private sector spending alone equals state capital expenditure, though the majority is focused on ICT infrastructure investments.

Colonialism: The economic impact of the colonization of Africa has been debated. In this matter, the opinions are biased between researchers, some of them consider that Europeans had a positive impact on Africa; others affirm that Africa's development was slowed down by colonial rule.

The principal aim of colonial rule in Africa by European colonial powers was to exploit natural wealth in the African continent at a low cost.

However, it is argued that these colonial policies are directly responsible for many of Africa's modern problems. Critics of colonialism charge colonial rule with injuring African pride, self-worth and belief in them.

Other post-colonial scholars most notably our current African generation continuing along this line, have argued that the true effects of colonialism were psychological and that domination by a foreign power created a lasting sense of inferiority and subjugation that creates a barrier to growth and innovation.

Such arguments posit that a new generation of Africans free of colonial thought and mindset is emerging and that this is driving economic transformation.

African History has argued that Africa probably benefited from colonialism on balance. Although it had its faults, colonialism was probably "one of the most efficacious engines for cultural diffusion in world history".

These views, however, are controversial and are rejected by some who, on balance, see colonialism as bad.

The economic historian may take a kind of middle position, arguing that the effects of colonialism were actually limited and their main weakness wasn't in deliberate underdevelopment but in what it failed to do.

Others might agree with the last point, arguing that colonialism's main weaknesses were sins of omission. Analysis of the economies of African states finds that independent states such as Liberia and Ethiopia did not have better economic performance than their post-colonial counterparts.

In particular the economic performance of former British colonies was better than both independent states and former French colonies.

Africa's relative poverty predates colonialism. As argued that Africa has always been poor due to a number of ecological factors affecting historical development.

These factors include low population density, lack of domesticated livestock and plants and the North-South orientation of Africa's geography. However such theories have been criticized by some as a form of environmental determinism.

It is still argued that sub-Saharan Africa was relatively wealthy and technologically advanced until at least the seventeenth century.

For example, it is argued that most of Africa has always been relatively poor, but "Aksum, Ghana, Songhai, Mali, [and] Great Zimbabwe... were probably as developed as their contemporaries anywhere in the world."

A number of people have argued that the poverty of Africa at the onset of the colonial period was principally due to the demographic loss associated with the Slave Trade as well as other related societal shifts. We entirely rejected this view.

Both the African Union and the United Nations have outlined plans in modern years on how Africa can help itself industrialize and develop significant manufacturing sectors to levels proportional to the African economy in the 1960s with 21st-century technology.

This focus on growth and diversification of manufacturing and industrial production, as well as diversification of agricultural production, has fueled hopes that the 21st century will prove to be a century of economic and technological growth for Africa.

This hope, coupled with the rise of new leaders at present in Africa and in the future, inspired the term "the African Century”, referring to the 21st century potentially being the century when Africa's vast untapped labour, capital, and resource potentials might become a world player.

This hope in manufacturing and industry is helped by the boom in communications technology and local mining industry in much of sub-Saharan Africa.

Nigeria is currently the largest manufacturer of cement in Sub-Saharan Africa. And Dangote Cement Factory is well established in Tanzania,
In East Africa; the main industries are textile and clothing, leather processing, agribusiness, chemical products, electronics and vehicles. East African countries like Uganda also produce motorcycles for the domestic market.

During the 1960s, Ghanaian politician Kwame Nkrumah and Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere the Father of Tanzanian nation promoted economic and political union of African countries, with the goal of independence.

Since then, objectives, and organizations, have multiplied. Recent decades have brought efforts at various degrees of regional economic integration. Trade between African states accounts for only “11% of Africa's total commerce as of 2012, around five times less than in Asia”.

Most of this intra-Africa trade originates from South Africa and most of the trade exports coming out of South Africa go to abutting countries in Southern Africa.

There are currently eight regional organizations that assist with economic development in Africa.