AN APPRAISAL OF THE AFRICAN CRISIS OF DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

In the debate of Africa’s development crisis stands one indisputable reality that the continent still remains highly underdeveloped after many years of her development strides and even the wake of globalization. Obviously, from whatever angle one may wish to consider the Africa predicament, either strictly from socio-economic perspective that focuses on economic variables particularly, income growth that confuses growth with development or from ‘physical quality of life index’ of (Morris) or the United Nation Development Programme (UNDP) Africa is still remains backward. Even, if we look at it from Human Development Index (HDI), broadened to encompass socio-economic indicators, the data still points to the same underdevelopment situation of Africa.  However, the simple reason for this is that consistently, the Gross National Product (GNP) and Per Capita Income levels in virtually all African Countries have remained below the conventional standard.  The exhibition of the Africa’s situation range from low socio-economic indices, high inflation rate, increasing debt burden, high rate of infant mortality and high numbers of out of school children, to lack of good social amenities,  low life expectancy at birth, high rate of unemployment, extreme poverty and social insecurity. It is therefore in view of this that paper attempts to critically appraise the African development crisis, causes and some possible solutions. To achieve these, this paper employs analytical method because of the complexity of the topic.