Is Africa rising? Judging by the buzz and optimism of the young business leaders and political trailblazers from across the continent who gathered for the World Economic Forum on Africa earlier this month, the answer is a qualified "yes." The African Leadership Network - co-founded by Stanford graduates Fred Swaniker, now the CEO of the African Leadership Academy, and Achankeng Leke, director of McKinsey's Nigerian operations - is emblematic of a new generation of leaders who brim with sophisticated confidence about Africa's emergence. They are part of the coming elite whose ideas shaped the discussion in Cape Town.
There is a new discourse on African development. Echoing last June's UN-sponsored Rio Plus 20 summit on sustainable development, many young leaders want to replace the 2015 Millennium Development Goals, defined in the global North, with Sustainable Development Goals defined in the global South. Their call is to follow an era of loans and aid with one of investment and trade by "Unlocking Africa's Talent" - the WEF theme for the Cape Town meeting.
Optimism about Africa's prospects is not new. Fifteen years ago, then South African Deputy President Thabo Mbeki heralded a coming African renaissance. He turned out to be prescient. Helped along by a sustained boom in world commodity prices and insulated from the worst of the global financial crisis by low levels of debt, at least when compared with the US and much of Europe, many African economies are thriving. Last month Africa Monitor singled out South Africa, Nigeria, Angola, Ghana and Ethiopia as high-growth economies to watch. Of the world's fastest growing economies, five of the top 12 and 11 of the top 20 are now in Africa.
Rwanda, best known for the genocidal murder of a million people less than two decades ago, is now peaceful and flourishing, with a 7.8 percent projected GDP growth rate for 2013 and an announced goal of eliminating dependence on foreign aid. According to the World Bank's 2013 Doing Business report, Rwanda is the world's second most improved nation since 2005 and the most improved in sub-Saharan Africa. Recent discoveries of vast quantities of natural gas in Mozambique promise to grow that country's GDP by a factor of 10 in the coming decade. Hedge funds have been investing even in Zimbabwe - to the point where investment director David Stevenson was wondering in Moneyweek in 2010 whether it might be "the next emerging market dynamo."
In an era of financial upheavals and bursting bubbles, we are bound to ask how much of this Africa enthusiasm is hype. Global GDP, trade or investment figures do not show the continent having that much impact yet, and 18 of the world's 20 poorest countries are still in Africa - the other two being war-torn Afghanistan and earthquake-devastated Haiti.
The African situation might be even worse than the statistics suggest. As noted by WEF co-chair and philanthropist Mo Ibrahim, born in South Sudan and who went on to study in Britain before and founding the telecommunications firm Celtel, there is no reliable data on poverty for many of Africa's poor countries. This is to say nothing of the effects of civil strife roiling North and West Africa. At least 50,000 have now died in Libya's post-Gaddafi continuing catastrophe. Egypt, with its decimated tourist industry, exploding population and collapsing infrastructure may be heading for the ranks of failed states. Somalia and Mali stagger along.
There was much talk in at the WEF of reducing poverty-and-inequality, often uttered almost as a single word. It' is far from obvious that the two go so easily together. China has pulled millions out of poverty over the past few decades, but inequality there has increased dramatically. South Africa has also made inroads into its high poverty rates since the 1994 transition, but its Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality, remains unchanged and one of the highest among countries for which data are available. There are contrarian examples, Lula's Brazil being a country in which poverty and inequality were reduced together. But people in Cape Town were not talking about Lula.
