Chapter 1
Social Contracts in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Research Program Introduction Despite significant gains in the fight against poverty and tremendous continental heterogeneity, the Africa region continues to lag across development indicators. Although the incidence of extreme poverty fell from 54 percent in 1990 to 41 percent in 2015, persistently high fertility rates led to an absolute increase of Africans living on less than US$1.90 a day from 278 million to 413 million in that same time frame. By 2030 extreme poverty is expected to be an exclusively African phenomenon. African countries account for 24 of the 25 lowest scores on the Human Capital Index 2020 (World Bank 2020). Trailing other regions, energy access is at 37 percent; only 5 percent of agricultural land is irrigated; adult literacy is at 58 percent; and Africa’s share of global foreign direct investment has hovered around 3 percent for the past decade (Zeufack et al. 2020). In many states, delivery of public goods and services remains wanting, and the expected dividends from shifts to multiparty democracy in most parts of the continent have failed to yield either economic dynamism or enhanced state capability. The skills gap with other regions is increasing. The pace of structural transformation is slow, and the move out of agriculture is to a large extent into low-productivity and vulnerable informal jobs. More than 50 percent of the world’s conflicts are also in Africa, while the region has only 16 percent of the global population (United Nations and World Bank 2018; World Bank 2017); large swaths of the continent suffer from the devastating effects of large-scale internal displacement, refugee flight, and economic out-migration. Explanations for Africa’s poor performance and persistent challenges are myriad, but the World Bank has generally focused on the issue of policy, positing that by adopting and implementing the “right policies” African states can break out of poverty traps. But the mixed record of decades of policy advice and 7
