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APARC State of Africa Report: good governance fueling growth
Nigeria is developing a technology park intended to be its version of Silicon Valley and recently commissioned a $300 million telecommunications satellite. Ghana, meanwhile, increased clothing and textile exports to the United States by almost 50 percent in 2003, partly as a result of professional training programs. And Tanzania, which this year holds its fifth cycle of multiparty elections, boasted an average growth rate of 5.4 percent per annum over the past five years, despite a prolonged drought in 2002 and 2003.
Those are the types of stories Westerners don’t often hear about African nations, and dozens of them fill the pages of the 2004 State of Africa Report released recently by BU’s African Presidential Archives and Research Center (APARC). The report, which is a collection of documents authored by 13 current African leaders who are democratically elected, each providing an overview of their country’s recent reform initiatives, successes, and challenges, is being distributed to key members of Congress, the White House, and the European Union, as well as to media outlets around the world and dozens of African leaders. Other countries represented in the report are Benin, Botswana, Cape Verde, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Zambia.
“The most general observation one should make from looking at this report is that democratization and free market reform are rooted firmly on the continent,” says Ambassador Charles Stith, APARC director, who returned recently from a monthlong trip to Africa. “You see that in the nine consecutive free and open elections Botswana has held, you see that in the progress Ghana is making along the lines of democratic governance, and you see that in places like South Africa, which in the last 10 years has enjoyed its most sustained period of economic growth since it began accurately tracking its gross national product.”
Other report highlights include the increased numbers of women in high-profile jobs and the extension of financial credit to women farmers in Ghana, the recent success of Mozambique’s second nationwide municipal elections and that country’s advancement of children’s rights, and the 1.6 million housing units that South Africa reports having built for the poor in the last 10 years.
Former Botswana leader Sir Ketumile Masire new African President-in-Residence
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March 2005
Boston University
Office of University Relations