MAY/JUNE 2008
Is It Africa's Turn?
Progress in the world's poorest region
Edward Miguel
Things were certainly looking up when I last visited Busia, a small city in Kenya, in mid-2007. Busia, home to about 60,000 residents, spans Kenya’s western border with Uganda: half the town sits on the Kenyan side and half in Uganda. As befits a border town, Busia is well endowed with gas stations, seedy bars, and hotels catering to the truckers who spend the night on the way from Nairobi to Uganda.
When I visited last June, the city was experiencing an economic renaissance. Busia’s first supermarkets, ATMs, Internet cafés, and car rental businesses were all open, and residential suburbs had formed on the edge of town. The small dukas—shops selling home food supplies and airtime for now-omnipresent cell phones—were freshly painted with advertisements for local dairy products. And most importantly, the road from Kisumu, the economic hub of the region and Kenya’s third largest city, to Busia had become a paved, two-lane highway all the way to the border, expediting trade with Uganda’s productive factories and farmers.
Yet, barely a decade ago, poverty and desperation were pervasive there, as in all of western Kenya.
This article has become a book!
Africa’s Turn?
Edward Miguel
Cloth / April 2009
“A refreshing take on the fortunes of Africa in the
current century and a fascinating compendium of some of the leading theorists of African development.” — Publishers Weekly
By the end of the twentieth century, sub–Saharan Africa had
experienced twenty–five years of economic and political disaster.
While “economic miracles” in China and India raised hundreds of
millions from extreme poverty, Africa seemed to have been overtaken by
violent conflict and mass destitution, and ranked lowest in the world
in just about every economic and social indicator.
Working in Busia, a small Kenyan border town, economist Edward Miguel
began to notice something different starting in 1997: modest but
steady economic progress, with new construction projects, flower
markets, shops, and ubiquitous cell phones. In Africa’s Turn? Miguel
tracks a decade of comparably hopeful economic trends throughout
sub–Saharan Africa and suggests that we may be seeing a turnaround.
Responding to Miguel, nine experts gauge his optimism: Olu Ajakaiye,
Ken Banks, Robert Bates, Paul Collier, Rachel Glennerster, Rosamond
Naylor, Smita Singh, David N. Weil, and Jeremy M. Weinstein.
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Comments
Many of the "democracies" you mention don't live up to their status, considerng how much corruption and how many human rights abuses take place.