Chapter 23: Sub-Saharan Africa’s Development Experience and Policy Practice, 1960–2018^☆

Africa’s development experience over the past six decades has been varied, cyclical, and sporadic. After a spurt of postindependence economic growth and nascent structural transformation, negative external shocks, poor policy responses to the shocks, and poorly implemented development strategies resulted in economic stagnation in the 1980–1995 period when the gains of the first two decades of independence were quickly wiped out and poverty intensified (Ajakaiye & Jerome, 2014). The period between 1996 and 2010, however, brought some respite to obviate this picture of gloom for Africa during which the continent witnessed unprecedented economic growth, emerging as the second fastest growing region in the world and also spawning the “Africa rising” narrative. However, there are indications that the growth momentum has started waning from 2011 onwards, raising the specter of another era of low growth and deepening poverty. Nonetheless, the quest for economic transformation which was reasonably initiated during the first decades of independence and lost during the 1986–1995 has remained elusive ever since.