Afrika nach der Hilfe: Kürzungen haben die wirtschaftliche Widerstandsfähigkeit des Kontinents offenbart

[Excerpt from essay by Landry Signé, Professor and Executive Director of the Washington Center at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Co-Chair of the Regional Action Group for Africa at the World Economic Forum.]

African economies still face many challenges. Volatility, state failure, humanitarian emergencies, and fragility continue to haunt countries across the continent. But a focus on crises obscures the more consequential story of African resilience. As the global economic order fragments, many African economies are well positioned to weather the storm. If policymakers recognized this variation, rather than treating Africa as a single risk category, they would concentrate their engagement with the continent’s most structurally resilient economies while tailoring their support to the others by investing in institutional capacity where governance is weak and in ways to reduce external exposure where institutions are strong.