I’m an African, I’ve lived all over the continent (until very recently). What you say is correct. By many metrics life has improved, and that is to be celebrated. But internally, I’m a bit conflicted because for sure this development has also come at a cost: (1) some of us now have electricity, but we’ve poisoned our city air, (ii) some of us have running water, but we’ve destroyed our watersheds and the severity of droughts is increasing, (iii) we have better roads (thanks China!), but we’re extensifying our farm land into forest because we’ve been caning our soils, (iv) we’ve got 4g and mobile money, but man, our leaders still brutalize us if we step out of line.

In conclusion, I don’t dispute what you say, there is a great deal of wonderful progress on the continent, but the narrative should not be either/or, and of course varies by country, but it’s neither dystopian famine, or development utopia.

I agree with you 100%.

I certainly am not pro-development at all costs. Heck, I choose to live in the Yukon precisely because it's not Vancouver or Toronto.

I hope "Africa" can see what the West has done, learn from it, and do a better job instead of just blindly going down the same path and screwing things up in the same ways.

It seems as if the onset of development is always coupled with horrible environmental problems. Another 20 years in the future, Africa will have more money to mitigate them.

The gyst of Grantham’s essay which I posted below (also at the bottom of this comment), throws into question that optimism. With evidence, Grantham demonstrates the possibility that a nexus of climate change, soil degradation and population growth threatens Africa’s development trajectory. My view is that this will happen within 20 years as banks pull credit lines from farmers at risk of weather shock. Indeed this is already happening and farmer’s production goes off a cliff when they can’t get loans for good seed and fertiliser.

I don’t write this because I’m a doom and gloom merchant. It’s because we need to get real about investing sufficiently to course correct.

Edit: here’s Grantham’s essay:

https://www.gmo.com/docs/default-source/research-and-comment...

The only ones that get close are the ones on the ground. With the exception of Congo (French speaking), nearly every major city has an English language newspaper online. Yes, they are heavily biased, but the headlines give one at least some degree of information about what is going on. Twitter is also a goldmine for getting a view of Africa, grisly as that can be (municipalities will livestream corporal punishment at times). I tend to use: http://www.congoindependant.com/ , https://dailytimes.ng/category/news/ , https://dailynews.co.tz/tags/local.aspx , https://twitter.com/chismaiocity?lang=en (example, some NSFL content there recently, fyi) , and https://www.aljazeera.com/ (better than BBC at least) .

Related: Some fun questions I like to lead with when discussing Africa and the coming miracle there are:

Where is the Great Wall of Africa/Nigeria? Hint: It's not on dry land ;)

In numbers of Californias, how many people will live in Kinshasa by 2099?

How fast is the bullet train from Nairobi to Mombasa? Who financed it?

I can believe that. Among those people in the west who even think about it, many are vested in the idea of African nations being hopelessly impoverished.

I have found it to be so ingrained in people it's like an automatic response. The TV ads with all the starving "African" children of the 80s and 90s have sunk in, and stuck. Convincing people otherwise will be a herculean task.

> There is a lot more development, infrastructure, happiness and success here than the majority of "First Worlders" have any notion of.

For ages, I've been trying to think of way to monetize this ignorance (or information asymmetry, if you're feeling generous). The only advantage I know is that this ignorance results is lack of first-world competition, which can be huge advantage