Africa's best hope lies within itself

What will happen to Africa? The catastrophic effect on the continent of the tragedy of Aids is at last being made clear to the world, thanks to the Durban conference this week. It is not just the high levels of infection, alarming though they are. The fact that Aids seems disproportionately to strike the young and educated means that the next generation of leaders - the people who might be forming new businesses or improving the quality of public administration - are being swept away. It is an extraordinarily cruel blow that the continent that had by far the weakest economy of any region in the world should be further devastated in this way.

What will happen to Africa? The catastrophic effect on the continent of the tragedy of Aids is at last being made clear to the world, thanks to the Durban conference this week. It is not just the high levels of infection, alarming though they are. The fact that Aids seems disproportionately to strike the young and educated means that the next generation of leaders - the people who might be forming new businesses or improving the quality of public administration - are being swept away. It is an extraordinarily cruel blow that the continent that had by far the weakest economy of any region in the world should be further devastated in this way.

A glance at the economic statistics shows just how far it already lags behind. Sub-Saharan Africa has a population of some 580 million people. The GDP of the region is $320bn (£211bn). There are 6 billion people in the world and the global GDP is about $29,000bn (£19,123bn). That means that just under 10 per cent of the world's population generates - and has to live on - just over 1 per cent of its wealth.

More than one third of that wealth comes from South Africa. Take that away and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa (population 535 million) has an economy smaller than that of the 5.3 million in Denmark.

Of course, like all economic statistics, you have to take GDP figures with a bit of caution. GDP is economic activity measured by what goes through the market. In less-developed economies, a lot of activity takes place outside the market: friends and families help each other on a mutual-support basis, rather than working for money. So perhaps the most worrying thing is not just those low levels of income per head, but the fact that they are, in most cases, lower than they were 25 years ago, and still falling now.

If you move from pure economics to the more general measure, human development (which takes into account things such as health and education), the figures are equally dreadful. The bottom 24 countries in the UN's human development league are all in sub-Saharan Africa. The very bottom spot is occupied by a country much in the news in recent weeks, Sierra Leone. And all this is before Aids has really begun to take hold.

So what does one say? There is a profound temptation for people in the rich West either to switch off and conclude that nothing much can be done, or alternatively give some money to an aid agency and let them get on as best they can. The "hand-wring-and-patch" approach may be the main response over the next 25 years. But if so we should be unsurprised if it fails. Is there any practical alternative?

The starting point must surely be to understand the situation. I am well aware of the argument that the legacy of colonialism combined with Cold-War competition made it very difficult for the newly independent nations to establish any record of good governance. But the most convincing explanation of the difficulties of Africa I've found comes in Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs and Steel.

In it, Professor Diamond looks back at that great puzzle of humankind. Why, if the first humans came out of Africa, did civilisation spring up elsewhere?

Put simply, it was damn bad luck. Take food. To create cities you need a food surplus. Africa, like the Americas but unlike Eurasia, is aligned north-south. So food crops that grow well in one region could not easily spread to others. Thus the techniques of Egypt could not be easily transferred to the rest of Africa. Or domestic animals. For an animal to be useful to humans it has to be reasonably big (so it can pull things or feed a lot of people) and reasonably docile (so it can be herded). Cattle, horses, sheep, pigs - derived from Eurasian forebears - all fulfil these needs. The African animals that were big enough (lions, African elephants, hippos etc) were too fierce to be useful.

If you take on board Professor Diamond's central point - that it was not the fault of African people that they failed to move out of hunter-gathering or small-scale agriculture to found cities or develop technology - then you have a base to start thinking about ways in which the continent's condition might be improved over the next 25 years. The West can and must help, but the best hopes for lifting the performance of the region will come from within Africa itself.

To an economist, there is a tantalising possibility. Because much of Africa has been so badly governed in recent years, it doesn't need to be well governed to achieve real progress. There are plenty of enterprising people, lots of commercial zeal, and new communications technologies that are well suited to African needs. There is also a yearning desire to learn. My own glimpse of that was four years ago in a village some 70 miles north of Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. The country is third from the bottom of the UNDP development league. This particular village was so poor that no one had even a bicycle. But it had a school, which the people had built themselves, and a teacher who was paid by an aid agency. The school had no books, and all teaching was in a foreign language, French. But the children's exercise books were beautifully written: neat and orderly. The village as a whole had order: there had been good rains that year and the crops had done well, the homes were neat and clean, the market-place bustling. It was a humbling experience to see so much being done with so little.

I don't doubt the UNDP calculations but Burkina Faso in general did not feel like the third from the bottom of the human development league. Viewed close, Africa is not always as hopeless as it seems when viewed from afar.

So what needs to happen? An optimistic possibility would encompass three essentials. First, better governance. Where there has been a reasonably competent government and civil administration there has been considerable progress. Botswana has increased its GNP per head three-fold in the last 25 years. South Africa, for all its problems, has come through the transition of power better than many people expected 10 years ago. Uganda, still desperately poor, has at least increased its GDP per head by 50 per cent over the last 15 years.

Essential two is harnessing the potential of the new communications technologies. For the first time in human history we have virtually free telecommunications. A fundamental democratisation of information is taking place. Provided Africa makes the networks available at a reasonable cost, the basic building blocks are there to allow just the sort of bottom-up educational revolution that the continent needs. There is a profound danger that there will be a deepening digital divide if access is made too expensive. But there is also a wonderful possibility that Africans can get free or near-free access to the knowledge of the world at the click of mouse.

And essential three is coping with Aids. If one and two above will come largely from within, this must come from without. Whether or not you accept the thesis outlined in Edward Hooper's book The River, that Aids developed in Africa as a result of botched trials by Western health organisations of the early polio vaccines, only the West has the resources to help. Leaving aside the moral argument, it is profoundly in the self-interest of the developed world to do everything it can to contain the catastrophe. It is one area where we can help.