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A good question that I chanced to see in the United States as asked on Aljazeera, in a program
originating from my native country, the Netherlands. People make good money working on the topic,
which won't go away anytime soon: compare the question to another: what was needed for the development
of Europe over the last 500 years? or, how did the US develop over the last 400 years? With this proviso,
here are three points: more is pointless.
1: Fewer, much fewer children. With less than 2 children per woman, each child will have more
natural resources than his or her parents (assuming that the 'resources' stay the same). This helped a lot,
reportedly, in England in the 1300s during the 'Black Death'.
2: Educate women, and men too: once educated, they will see that one step everyone can take is:
getting fewer children, and taking care of each child better than they were taken care of themselves. This is
presently at work in Europe and, with a vengeance, in China.
3: Learn from the outside world what works and what doesn't. Big Men who monopolize wealth for their
own enjoyment hinder development, sharing the wealth, in some reasonable and socially accepted way,
increase development. For most people feudal Europe wasn't very prosperous either....
Implementing these suggestions will bring its own problems. So, work through them. Something like this must
happen, naturally (by famines and such) or by policy. I hope the latter.
As European with some experience of Africa , I think that long term development in Africa should start from basics.
When we talking about aid or what ever help , we normally talking about help to rural areas in most of the African countries, because there are no jobs and so on. Therefore, I believe that start should be building roads and bring electricity to everywhere. African soil is very rich for cultivation of different kinds of things. Problem is that , there is no demand of these products if there is no way to deliver it fast to nearest port. If you looking for infrastructure in most African countries, you can see which places are doing better than others. That should be a start.
Foreign investments comes after some infrastructure is ready and foreign companies can see potential in rural areas.
Other thing is that until 5 years ago, there was concern about political situations as well. Lots of African countries were run by dictators and their families. This is now changing little by little. Many foreign investor came to Africa just to realize that they had to deal only with certain persons and that scared them off.
I don't believe that aid is long term solution and like your show in TV , sub-Saharan africa have to stay in news, maybe one day we could even get some good news from there.
