Can Africa Follow Asia’s Development Model? |
As many authors know, book projects often grow out of coincidences, those chance encounters and experiences that stem from one’s upbringing or personal background. Even by these standards, the genesis of How Africa Works by Joe Studwell is a striking story.
On the book’s first page, Studwell declares that he never intended to write on its topic and that it had begun as a mistake. Mistake perhaps, but no ordinary one. As Studwell relates, in 2016, he was invited separately by the governments of Ethiopia and Rwanda to assess their development strategies and present his findings to senior officials. Their interest had been primed by a series of popular and well-received books Studwell had written, dating back to the early 2000s, about economic growth in East Asia (especially China), where he had worked as a business journalist.
As many authors know, book projects often grow out of coincidences, those chance encounters and experiences that stem from one’s upbringing or personal background. Even by these standards, the genesis of How Africa Works by Joe Studwell is a striking story.
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier, Joe Studwell, Atlantic Monthly Press, 448 pp., $32, February 2026
On the book’s first page, Studwell declares that he never intended to write on its topic and that it had begun as a mistake. Mistake perhaps, but no ordinary one. As Studwell relates, in 2016, he was invited separately by the governments of Ethiopia and Rwanda to assess their development strategies and present his findings to senior officials. Their interest had been primed by a series of popular and well-received books Studwell had written, dating back to the early 2000s, about economic growth in East Asia (especially China), where he had worked as a business journalist.
The same year he was approached by two of Africa’s fastest-growing countries, Studwell ran into Bill Gates, who was already familiar with his writing. Gates told him, “What I’d really like to know is what you think about Africa.” Studwell says he gave this little thought at the time, but that “two years later, after finishing a doctoral thesis and a bit of reading about Africa, I decided that perhaps I should see if I could say something useful about the continent,” a part of the world he calls “the last great frontier of global development.”
The results are often fascinating and demonstrate a consistently earnest effort to grapple with Africa’s many challenges, but are nonetheless uneven. Readers should not be put off by this statement. A self-assigned task this ambitious invokes numerous daunting challenges, beginning with the significant disadvantage of the author’s limited background in Africa and the sheer size and diversity of the continent, which is made up of countries with vastly different historical backgrounds, economies, and developmental strategies.
On top of these considerations comes the fact that even economists increasingly concede the limits of their field in producing any surefire blueprint for national economic development—never mind one for an entire continent—that can survive contact with the infinite complexities of the real world. But that has not prevented them, or Studwell, for that matter, from working on humanity’s biggest challenges, and nor should it.
People gather on a pedestrian bridge to celebrate the New Year in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Jan. 1. Ericky Boniphace/AFP via Getty Images
In its opening sections, How Africa Works reflects a bit of the cram course nature of the effort, leaning into much of the best-known scholarship on the continent going back decades. Most of this constitutes Western thinking about the continent as it has evolved from the colonial era to the near-present. These parts of the book have something of the feel of a digest, and in moments, as the author’s gaze shifts from region to region and country to country, the sheer density of factual information in his thumbnail sketches gave me the sensation of reading an almanac or encyclopedia.
Even in these early sections, though, Studwell is doing important work, offering valuable context that will be unfamiliar to readers who have never made a serious study of Africa. And because the continent receives cursory treatment in Western news coverage, education, public policy, and diplomacy, that will simply mean most readers.
Near the start, Studwell presents two fundamentally important facts that are widely known among Africa experts (but generally unknown to the broader public) as the main causes for Africa’s lagging economic development. Many readers of international coverage of the continent will be surprised that Studwell explicitly states that neither corruption nor conflict rank highly among the determining factors.
The first culprit, according to Studwell, is that until recently, the continent suffered from starkly low population density compared with most other parts of the world, due to the twin curses of endemic tropical disease and the half-millennium apocalypse of the slave trade.
The second is that Africa also faced what the author calls “low budget” colonialism at the hands of European powers, which spent next to nothing on education and general-purpose infrastructure while doing little to prepare the continent for independence. When freedom came to Africa beginning in the late 1950s, its rates of........