How the world's climate promises became a new way to keep Africa poor

 

"[The world] today says ... 'Net Zero by 2050. ... 

"Banks sign net-zero pledges and quietly stop funding energy projects in Africa (while continuing to fund the exact same projects in America, Canada, and Norway). The African Energy Chamber has a term for this: financial apartheid.

"Meanwhile, NGOs run campaigns ... to pressure Western financiers out of ... a project Uganda and Tanzania are building to export their own oil. The European Parliament actually passed a resolution against it in September 2022. ... And every quarter, investors publish sustainability reports full of net-zero targets that have almost nothing to do with whether anyone in sub-Saharan Africa can turn on a light. 

"Africa is responsible for about 4% of global CO₂ emissions. Four percent. No serious calculation says that cutting off financing to the continent that contributes the least will change the trajectory of the climate. ...

"Back home, 600 million people on my continent don’t have electricity.

"The WHO estimates that cooking with wood and charcoal kills around 800,000 people a year in Africa from the smoke alone, most of them women and children. 

"The solution is LPG, which comes from natural gas, but building the gas infrastructure to distribute it gets caught in the same net-zero 'logic' that chokes everything else.

"Nigeria sits on some of the largest natural gas reserves in the world yet its power grid collapsed again in February 2026. At Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital in 2025, three ICU patients died during a blackout because the hospital had gone days without power. Twenty-six percent of health facilities across sub-Saharan Africa have no electricity at all. And the people signing those net-zero pledges in London and New York will never know their names.

"No single bank executive decided to keep Africans in the dark. But the world's net-zero pledges created a structure where not funding African fossil fuels became the easy, compliant thing to do, and funding them became a career risk. ...

"I grew up in Senegal, and I remember my grandmother cooking over fire because there was nothing else when the power went out. Cutting off Africa’s energy doesn’t save the planet. It just guarantees that the next generation grows up the same way mine did.

"That’s what I’m working to change through Prosperity Not Poverty — because African nations have the right to use their own resources to build their own futures."

~ Magatte Wade from her post 'The Lie Keeping Africa in the Dark'

"This is why I focus on prosperity-building instead of complaining all the time about the past."

"Whenever I say colonialism isn't why Africa is poor today, people rush to say 'but it's neocolonialism.'
    "The truth is we are 'neo-colonised' because we are poor. We are not poor because we are neo-colonised.
    "In today's world, nations either create prosperity or they live under someone else's rules. This is why I focus on prosperity-building instead of complaining all the time about the past.
    "It's the only way out."

~ Magatte Wade from her post 'Why Is Africa Poor?'

QotD: "South Africa has until recently been a decent model for other [African] countries to orient their policies toward. But if the continent’s biggest economic engine moves more and more in the direction of Zimbabwe, then economic growth, investor confidence, and, most important, average people going about their daily lives will suffer not only in South Africa but in the nearby countries with which it trades and does business."

"South Africa has until recently been a decent model for other [African] countries to orient their policies toward. But if the continent’s biggest economic engine moves more and more in the direction of Zimbabwe, then economic growth, investor confidence, and, most important, average people going about their daily lives will suffer not only in South Africa but in the nearby countries with which it trades and does business."
~ John Fund, from his article, "Will South Africa Follow the Path of Zimbabwe?"

[Hat tip Samizdata]

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Africa is getting richer, thanks to capitalism

 

Like everyone else, Africans want wealth – but haven’t always valued the culture and institutions that produce it. That is changing, says Marian Tupy in this guest post; small steps to be sure, but Africa is beginning to embrace the values of reason, individualism and capitalism just as parts of the west are discarding them.

Sub-Saharan Africa consists of 46 countries and covers an area of 9.4 million square miles. One out of seven people on earth live in Africa, and the continent’s share of the world’s population is bound to increase because Africa’s fertility rate remains higher than elsewhere.

If current trends continue, there will be more people in Nigeria than in the United States by 2050. What happens in Africa, therefore, is important not only to the people who live on the continent but also to the rest of us.

The Hopeful Continent

Africa may be the world’s poorest continent, but it is no longer a “hopeless continent,” as the Economist magazine described it back in 2000. Since the start of the new millennium, Africa’s average per capita income, adjusted for inflation and purchasing power parity, rose by more than 50 percent, and Africa’s growth rate has averaged almost 5 percent per year.

Increasing wealth has led to improvements in all key indicators of human wellbeing. In 1999, 58 percent of Africans lived on less than $1.90 per day. By 2011, 44 percent of Africans lived on that income — all while the African population rose from 650 million to 1 billion. If the current trends continue, Africa’s absolute poverty rate will fall to 24 percent by 2030.

Life expectancy rose from 54 years in 2000 to 62 years in 2015. Infant mortality declined from 80 deaths per 1,000 live births to 49 deaths over the same time period. When it comes to HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, their occurrence, detection, treatment, and survival rates have all improved. Food supply exceeds 2,500 calories per person per day (the USDA recommends consumption of 2,000 calories), and famines have disappeared outside of warzones. Primary, secondary, and tertiary school enrolments have never been higher.

The Wealth of African Nations

Some of Africa’s growth was driven by high commodity prices, but much of it, a McKinsey study found in 2010, was driven by economic reforms. To appreciate how significant these were, it is important to recall that, for much of their post-colonial history, African governments have imposed central control over their economies. Commonplace policies included inflationary monetary policies; price, wage, and exchange rate controls; marketing boards that kept the prices of agricultural products artificially low and impoverished African farmers; and state-owned enterprises and monopolies.

That began to change after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Socialism lost much of its appeal, and the Soviet Union, which bankrolled and protected many African dictatorships, fell apart. Between 1990 and 2013, economic freedom, as measured by the Canadian Fraser Institute, rose from 4.75 out of 10 to 6.23. Freedom to trade rose even more, from 4.03 to 6.39. Most impressively, Africa has made much progress in monetary policy, or access to sound money, which rose from a low of 4.9 in 1995 to a remarkable 7.27 in 2013.

Africa has made similar strides in terms of microeconomic policy. As the World Bank’s Doing Business report indicates, Africa’s regulatory environment has much improved. Starting a business, for example, has become easier, with Africa’s score rising from 45 out of 100 in 2004 to 72 in 2015. Dealing with construction permits, resolving insolvencies, enforcing contracts, registering property, getting credit, access to electricity, and the ease of paying taxes have all much improved.

Governments Are Still Corrupt, Dictatorial, and Arbitrary

Unfortunately, there hasn’t yet been substantial improvement in the quality of Africa’s institutions. According to the Freedom House’s Freedom in the World 2016 report, there were only six free countries in sub-Saharan Africa: Benin, Botswana, Ghana, Namibia, Senegal, and South Africa. While many countries adopted more “democratic” constitutions that include term limits, and other legislative and institutional checks on the executive branch, African rulers have found a way around those provisions in order to maintain and abuse power.

According to the World Bank, corruption continues to thrive among government officials and, importantly, among members of the judiciary. As a consequence, rule of law indicators for African countries have remained, by and large, unchanged. Yet without efficient and impartial courts, Africa’s economic potential will always remain unfulfilled.

The Challenge and the Opportunity

That said, as experience in other regions shows, institutional development tends to lag behind economic reforms. In the medium to long run, growth of the African middle class might yet result in a political awakening and greater assertiveness of the African populace — and eventually the ‘democratisation’ of the continent.

The new millennium has been good to Africa, but the continent is still far from being prosperous, let alone democratic. In order for Africa’s economy to go on expanding, Africans will need to continue with their reforms — never forgetting that the world economy keeps on changing and global competition keeps on increasing. That is Africa’s challenge, as well as its opportunity.

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Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.
His article first appeared at FEE, CapX and HumanProgress.org.

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