Even before the global pandemic began, millions of Africans led incredibly difficult lives. More than 400 million people lived in extreme poverty, and there was a projected shortage of 350 million jobs by 2035. Covid-19 has only made things worse as demand for most of Africa’s commodity based exports to Asian, European, and US markets have dwindled.
As Covid-19 has spread across the globe, a worldwide shortage of ventilators has left hospitals scrambling to care for the sick. Nowhere is the shortage expected to be more acutely felt than in Africa, where many countries have only a handful, and some have none at all.
To say Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who passed away on Jan. 23, changed the trajectory of my life would be a severe understatement. In fact, not only did he change the trajectory of my life, but he also did it with such care and compassion that it would be understandable that some people might mistake me for his only protege.
At the 2015 Quartz Africa Innovators Summit in Nairobi, one of Kenya’s best known tech investors and activists, Ory Okolloh, spoke about how entrepreneurship was being promoted to the point of being fetishized in Africa. Referring to the lack of basic infrastructure and weak governance, she famously said, “You can’t “entrepreneur” around bad leadership, we can’t “entrepreneur” around bad policy.”
Even with most institutional reform projects failing, it is understandable why trying to change a poor country’s institutions feels so urgent. In many poor countries, the government is often the only game in town and wields significant influence on the economy.
As the wave of independence swept across Africa in the late 1950s, many geopolitical watchers speculated the region would soon become a significant economic and political powerhouse. There was hope that African countries would finally live up to their full potential.
Africa is overwhelmingly the poorest region in the world. In 2015, after more than a decade of the “Africa Rising” narrative, the region’s GDP was around $1.6 trillion, barely 2% of global GDP. The same year, Africa (including North Africa) attracted $38 billion in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), again just over 2%of global FDI, which was $1.7 trillion. On the issue of trade, Africa did not fair much better; the continent is responsible for just 3% of the $18 trillion worth of global trade.
