What a new deal for Africa’s development will look like in 2025

On January 23, 2025, I took part in a heated inter-civilizational dialogue on ‘development knowledge’ involving African and Chinese think tanks in Cairo, Egypt. Now on the cusp between poverty and development in the post-Covid-19 era, Africa has increasingly become a subject of research on development-related knowledge by networks of all hues, shades and tints. But development knowledge as neutral or above suspicion is a myth.

Knowledge, we now know, is understanding that a tomato is botanically a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad!” Wisdom is needed to unmask knowledge. Knowledge on development is intensely ideological. It carries the blinkered opinions, policies and interests of powerful countries or power blocs. My take-home lesson from the debate during the “China-Africa Knowledge Network for Development Symposium” is that in the next 25 years, the levers of power will be in the hands of those controlling development knowledge, including new technologies. 

Africa’s “development warriors” and thinkers must always remember that wisdom is understanding the thinking behind paradigms driving development. Two decades ago, at the Africa Policy Institute (API), an avowedly pan-Africa think tank, we chose as our motto: “knowledge is power”. We also understood that without power, knowledge is useless. 

The Cairo debate on development knowledge drew attention to Africa as a puzzling paradox. Africa is the richest region in terms of resources. It is home to nearly 30 per cent of the world’s mineral resources, 65 per cent of the world's arable land, 10 per cent of its internal renewable fresh water sources, and 18.3 per cent of the total world population in 2024 — projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050. Africa is poised to reap the demographic dividend of the world’s youngest population — averaging at 19.2 years — projected to double to over 830 million by 2050.

Yet, 67 per cent of Africans in Sub-Saharan Africa and 7 per cent in North Africa are living in extreme poverty. Over 35 million people, nearly half of the global total, are displaced by violent conflict. The optimism of “Africa rising” in opening decades of the 21st century is slowly giving way to a new bout of Afro-pessimism. From an average annual growth of 5 per cent in the 2010-2020 period, the continent’s growth has dipped to 3.6 percent by 2024. Its share of global merchandise trade stands at less than 3 per cent at the twilight of 2025. 

Westernisation equals modernization

Expectedly, debates on Africa’s development knowledge start with grace-to-grass anecdotes about ‘African lions’ like Kenya which provided benchmarking models and even assistance to some of the Asian Tigers in the 1960s and 1970s. This is followed by a frequent rhetorical question why the Asian Tigers developed while the African lions declined. 

The trouble with Africa’s development is firmly and squarely a failure of its leadership to innovatively and boldly chart an independent path to modernisation. Instead, it swallowed line, hook and sinker the view that westernisation equals modernization!

Accordingly, even though colonialism ended over six decades ago, its legacies and relics linger on and haunt Africa’s development. It is worth noting that by 1980, only two of Africa’s 54 countries — Guinea-Bissau and Uganda—had a lower GDP per capita than China — which was then reeling under a legacy of over a century of external occupation and external models of modernization.

But Beijing’s leadership adopted the ‘Opening Up and Reforms Policy’ in 1979, daringly charting a new independent path of development that blended market and socialism, which enabled China to rise to the world’s second largest economy. 

A vicious neo-colonial fight-back — the Ronald Reagan-era low-intensity warfare and coups, externally-backed corrupt, weak and tyrannical one-party regimes and the ruinous Structural Adjustment Policies imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — plunged the continent into “Lost Decades” in the 1980-2000 interlude marked by economic decline, poverty and global marginalization. In 2025, decolonizing Africa’s development space remains a bridge too far.

The recent surge of anti-French military takeovers and popular resistance against the policy of Françafrique that still treats former French colonies as France’s sphere of influence or backyard is a clear testimony to the sad reality. Deepening Africa’s development dilemma are global common challenges such as climate change, epidemics, food and energy insecurity and the disruptive potential of emerging technologies (AI) calls for a relook at the continent’s priorities, strategies and actors.

Ideals of the Africa Youth Charter

As of January 2025, approaches, strategies and actions to overcome the challenges of development coalesce around three broad agendas, which collectively form the New Deal for Africa’s development.

First is the Africa’s Agenda 2063 — now in its Second Ten-Year Implementation Plan (STYIP) — that prioritizes industrialization, regional integration and market access. It offers the best pathway to realize the ideals of the Africa Youth Charter, the Youth Decade Plan of Action and the

“Malabo decision on Accelerating Youth Empowerment for Sustainable Development,” expanding skills and opportunities for Africa’s young people. How to effectively land the Agenda in the Africa’s 55 states remains a million-dollar question. 
Second, the year 2025 marks the silver jubilee of the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), founded in 2000 as the premier policy dialogue and coordination platform between Africa and China.

Guiding Sino-Africa development Cooperation in the 2025-2027 period is the Beijing Declaration and its 10-point Action Plan adopted by the 2024 FOCAC summit, which prioritizes agriculture, talent development, energy, trade, industrialization and infrastructure. China has provided US$50 to fund these development priorities. Buttressing the FOCAC deal is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s multi-trillion dollar infrastructure project that involves 53 out of 54 African nations.

Third is China’s Global Development Initiative (GDI) as part of Beijing’s efforts to provide global public goods by increasing opportunities for people in the developing world to lift themselves out of hunger and poverty and to hasten the timely achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Cairo calls for a homegrown knowledge for Africa to re-engineer its development and empower its youth. 

Professor Peter Kagwanja is the Chief Executive at the Africa Institute (API)