Last updated January 2008
Good things are happening in Africa notwithstanding the daunting development challenges and the flood of bad news out of the continent. African nations made the greatest improvements and took the biggest steps in reducing corruption over the past ten years, according to the World Bank report ( Governance Matters 2007: Worldwide Governance Indicators 1996-2006 ) which measures the quality of government in 212 countries. Largely driven by booming commodity prices, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is seeing its strongest economic growth since the 1970s. Africans are among the world’s most optimistic peoples, recognizing poverty only as a temporary obstacle to the continent’s future of prosperity.
While progress has been slow towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), no other region of the world has seen more children enrolled into schools as in Africa, where gross primary school enrollments have not stopped improving since reaching 96 percent in 2004.
For a continent as diverse as Africa, progress has been uneven and slippages inevitable. The fifth annual edition of Doing Business 2008 – which ranks 178 economies on the ease of doing business based on 10 indicators of business regulation - found that Africa fell from third place to fifth in ranking by region on the pace of reforms, overtaken by South Asia and by the Middle East and North Africa.
For the first time ever, the World Bank Group – Africa’s leading financier – provided a record US$3.5 billion to the 15th replenishment of the International Development Association (IDA) from resources split between the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and IFC (International Finance Corporation), the Bank’s private sector arm.
The Bank’s strategy in Africa – its development priority region for the third successive year – is anchored in the Africa Action Plan (AAP). Through the AAP, the Bank is working in partnership with other development partners to undertake a set of concrete, results-oriented actions to assist African countries to meet as many of the MDGs as possible.
The Bank has adopted innovative ways of tackling some of the most persistent development problems Africa has, working with existing and emerging partners.
For more information, please see the Regional Brief.
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