Has Africa finally turned a corner?

Sarah Crowe, spokeswoman for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), says that even economic prosperity can bring its own set of new challenges.

"We're now moving to a world of peri-urban slums and megacities bursting at the seams – such as Kinshasa and Lagos and Nairobi – with people moving to cities to find work," says Ms. Crowe. Such big cities have been unable to keep pace with the population growth, and growing demand for clean drinking water and sanitation facilities. Big cities are also key points for the spread of HIV-AIDS, a disease with devastating economic potential, since it targets primarily those who are in their prime working years.

"Unquestionably, there is a momentum there, but the big challenge for NGOs (non-governmental organizations) will be these gray areas," adds Crowe.

Some in the aid community say that the World Bank's report may have been overzealous in painting a picture of African progress. "Turned a corner?" chortled one American financier with decades of experience in African aid projects. "This is a maze we're in here. There's going to be lots of corners."

Greg Mills, director of the Brenthurst Foundation, a think tank on strengthening African economic performance, argues that the most important trend seen in the World Bank report is showing that Africa can no longer be seen as a single entity.

"What the World Bank report is showing is the growing differentiation in the African continent, and the different problems between countries and regions," he says. "This is contrary to the notion of African Unity."

There are commodity-producing countries like Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Sudan, and South Africa, and agricultural powerhouses like Kenya and Tanzania. There are landlocked nations like the Central African Republic, with little access to global markets, and rapidly globalizing countries like South Africa, Mauritius, Tanzania, and Benin.

Finally, there are countries like Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sudan, and the DRC that are so large and diverse that they are difficult to govern as a single entity. While some of these larger countries often have valuable resources, they will still have trouble emerging as winners in the global marketplace unless they start to change their system of governance, Mr. Mills says.

"The critical elementary differences between [African] countries are their regimes and their natural resources," says Mills. "Since they can't change their size and resources, the one thing they can change is the style of their government, and those that are generally performing better are the latter group," which like Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana, and Uganda, have instituted substantial governmental reforms.

Ross Herbert, head of a research project on governance at the South African Institute for International Affairs in Johannesburg, says that one of the best signs for Africa in the past decade is that fewer African leaders solve their problems today by printing more money.

But Africa's current prosperity – largely the result of global demand for commodities such as natural gas, oil, timber, copper, iron, coal, and cobalt – is a temporary window of opportunity that analysts say should not be wasted.

"Africa has to go out into the world and learn markets," says Herbert. "Chinese companies went to Ghana and studied kinte cloth, and now you can buy Chinese cloth that emulates kinte that is cheaper than the local cloth."

"That is how competitive other countries are," he says. "We have to choose ... to climb the ladder faster than other countries. And no one, other than Zimbabwe, is standing still."

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