Africa has robust growth, and the region’s economic prospects remain good. GDP per capita has expanded at 2.4 percent per year, good for an average increase in GDP per capita of 50 percent since 1996.

But the averages also hide a substantial degree of variation. For example, GDP per capita in resource-rich countries grew 2.2 times faster during 1996-2011 than in resource-poor countries.

Despite the better growth performance, poverty declined substantially less in resource-rich countries. Fast growth has also been recorded in resource-poor countries such as Rwanda, Ethiopia and Mozambique.

Most importantly, the youth bulge will need to be absorbed in productive jobs. Migration out of agriculture into the rural nonfarm economy and secondary towns appears more conducive to faster poverty reduction.

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Does organizing groups of rural women producers contribute to empowerment as well as increasing their incomes? Yes, it can be a step towards increased empowerment under the right conditions.

Women rarely have equal say in or leadership of mixed groups, while women-only groups may face challenges with business viability. Empowerment was greater when women participate in informal as well as formal groups.

Learning from experience, development actors need to adopt flexible approaches to supporting collective action, taking the wider context into account, and supporting women’s own initiatives.

We also need to pay more attention to the policy environment, setting explicit targets to address women’s participation and leadership, and protecting the space for informal association.

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Africa must reverse the economic quagmire of the past decades by focusing on industrialisation as a necessary path towards sustained wealth creation for an emerging Africa.

There is no other road to successful, sustainable and inclusive structural transformation that can lift African peoples out of the poverty they have endured for almost half a century.

African policy makers agree on the need for an ambitious structural transformation of the economy, and this will only be done through focused and strong industrialisation.

Partnerships with other countries will be inevitable, although we can expect different dynamics. Working with external partners will necessitate a paradigm shift in mindsets.

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Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease are perhaps the best known novels not only to emerge from Africa but the entire world. The author of these classic works which embodied a clear anti-colonial theme, Chinua Achebe, passed away on March 21 in Boston.

Achebe will be remembered for his literary contributions and his fierce criticism of colonial and post-colonial African society. His books will remain a mainstay of libraries and classrooms for many generations to come.

Nigeria today has still not overcome the legacy of imperialism. Despite its vast oil wealth, there is profound inequality within the country. In order for real development to occur in Nigeria, there must be a break with the imperialist and neo-colonialist economic and political models.

There has to be a national program for the reconstruction of the country based upon the interests of the workers, farmers and youth of the country and this effort must be linked with the broader struggle throughout Africa and the world.

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If protecting human rights could be translated into a single political action, the creation of comprehensive social protection schemes would be it. Yet many of the world’s poorer states have not adopted anything like a comprehensive social safety net.

States can no longer claim to believe in human rights protection while failing to invest in social protection, for the two are intimately linked. There are many ways and means of funding a decent social safety net – now we need the political will.

One obvious problem with the global proposal is the lack of discussion on how it could be funded. You would probably need to put together all the proposals for international taxation to pull it off.

What kind of political coalition is going to do that? Politically, doing an Alaska at national level looks a lot more realistic.

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Development planning has a long and chequered history in Africa; our development trajectory has been influenced by various approaches to development planning since the early stages of independence.

National Development Strategies (NDS) have now gone beyond the narrow objective of poverty reduction to encompass accelerated growth, employment creation, structural transformation and sustainable development.

ECA has developed a network of development planners which includes an electronic platform that will serve as a repository of literature current research related to development planning.

Africa must continue to plan its development, increase policy space, and make prudent decisions about the appropriate strategies needed to achieve economic growth and structural transformation.

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Small firms are big business in the aid industry. Why? In a word, jobs. Globally, small and medium firms account for nearly 80 per cent of employment in the formal sector in low-income countries.

When micro and informal firms are counted, the employment share of micro- small and medium enterprises in developing countries rises to an estimated 90 per cent of all workers.

Aid should target those firms that are successful at creating ‘better’ jobs. These are growing firms, and this argues in the first instance for policies and programmes that reduce the constraints to the growth of firms, regardless of size.

Too much donor effort has been expended on achieving easily measured but low impact regulatory reforms and too little effort on relieving an important physical constraint to firm growth―lack of infrastructure.

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Are the days of gloating about Africa’s rise behind us? In the current debate about the continent’s growth performance – ‘myth or reality?’ – one crucial issue gets surprisingly little attention: employment.

The big picture is clear, and disappointing: Africa’s growth in the last ten years has failed to translate into enough jobs. Even this high growth did not create more jobs than much weaker growth in the 1990s.

Young Africans in particular cannot find productive and remunerative work. With 10-12 million more young people seeking work every year, job growth has to be much stronger to make a dent in unemployment.

Africa’s capacity to offer opportunities to its younger generation has been falling short of its demographic dynamism. The strong growth has been achieved without transforming African economies.

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This January, two years away from the expiry of the 2000 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the post 2015 agenda has already created a buzz in Monrovia and Johannesburg.

Last week ONE Africa launched a new post-2015 SMS and social media campaign called “You Choose”, which aims to engage Africans from all walks of life on what the new MDGs should focus on.

Unlike when the 2000 MDGs were created, the post-2015 MDGs process is seeking advice this time from citizens on what future MDGs should address when the current ones expire in 2015.

You Choose participants will have an option to join ONE so as to have opportunities to join the current campaigns ONE is running on improving health and agriculture investments in Africa.

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The ‘Africa rising’ narrative may be questionable and misguided, but so too is the suggestion Africa should blindly follow the authoritarian developmental states of East Asia.

While East Asia’s industrial policies certainly delivered rapid growth, they have been largely deployed via authoritarian, repressive frameworks that entailed frequent and sustained infringement of people’s rights.

But even with repression and authoritarianism, the likes of South Korea and Singapore did not achieve transformation in a single decade, the period which ‘Afro-optimists’ are referring to in their analysis.

What matters for developmental success is not simply whether a country sells natural resources of manufactures. Success hinges on much more complex issues, surrounding institutions and the incentives they generate.

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