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Unlearning Development: 7 Ideas That Do More Harm Than Good
Why does development in Africa seem so elusive despite decades of strategies, funding, and reform plans? Part of the answer lies in the stories we’ve been told about what development is, who drives it, and what stands in its way.
Across policy papers, donor reports, media narratives, and even our own institutions, a set of dominant myths continues to shape how development is conceptualized and pursued on the continent.
In this article, we unpack seven of the most common myths about development that are holding Africa back.
Myth 1: Economic Growth Equals Development
Ever wondered how it is that news headlines might say the economy is growing yet your life is getting harder?
That’s because for decades, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been treated as the gold standard for measuring development even though it only tells part of the story.
GDP captures the total value of goods and services produced in an economy but says nothing about who benefits from that growth, what is being produced, or how it affects people and the planet. A country can have rising GDP even as inequality deepens, jobs remain precarious, and basic needs go unmet.
Your President and Prime Minister might point to rising GDP figures as a basis for re-election but they won’t mention that most of the wealth is going to a small elite. The figures won’t capture the forests being cleared, rivers being polluted, or communities being displaced to make way for extractive industries. The unpaid care work (mostly done by women) that keeps households running will not feature in the GDP arithmetic.
Why does this matter?
Because what we measure shapes what we prioritize. When GDP becomes the main goal, development gets reduced to chasing growth at all costs even when that growth excludes, exploits, or exhausts people and the environment.
Reality
True development goes beyond numbers. It is about improving the quality of life for all people ensuring access to education, healthcare, livelihoods, housing, clean water, and political voice. It means building inclusive systems that enable human flourishing and protect the environment. Growth should certainly be part of the story but only if it translates into meeting the real needs of populations.
Development should not just ask “How much are we producing?” but “Who is benefiting?” and “At what cost?”
For more on this, please listen to this brilliant podcast series by OHCHR and UNSSC: Economies that Work for All
Myth 2: Africa is Poor Because It Lacks Resources
It’s common to hear that Africa is poor because it doesn’t have enough resources. But ask anyone who has travelled across the continent and you’ll hear the opposite. Africa is rich. Rich in minerals, arable land, sunlight, culture, and human potential.
So why does that wealth not translate into widespread prosperity?
The problem isn’t a lack of resources. It’s the way those resources are owned, controlled, and exploited. Africa’s wealth has been extracted first under colonialism, and today through multinational corporations, skewed trade deals, debt traps, and tax avoidance schemes. Raw materials are exported cheaply, and finished products are imported at high costs. Profits flow outward, while communities living near mines or oil fields remain poor.
In many cases, governments rely heavily on exporting a few commodities, leaving them vulnerable to global price shocks and beholden to external decision-makers. The real issue isn’t scarcity but structural exploitation and dependency.
Reality
Africa is not poor. Its people are being impoverished through systems designed to extract value rather than create it locally.
Real development means changing those systems and ensuring that Africa’s wealth is used to meet African needs. It means building industries that add value locally, strengthening national control over natural resources, closing tax loopholes, and challenging the global rules that keep African countries at the bottom of the economic ladder.
Myth 3: Foreign Aid Will Solve Africa's Problems
Foreign aid is often presented as Africa’s lifeline. From television appeals to pledges at global conferences, the message is the same: Africa’s future depends on the generosity of others. Aid is framed as a key ingredient for development.
But experience shows otherwise.
After decades of aid and billions of dollars, the big problems are still here. Poverty is still widespread; infrastructure is still lacking; and most African economies are still hooked on exporting raw materials.
In many cases, aid ends up reinforcing dependency instead of helping countries stand to on their own. Governments start planning around what donors are willing to fund, rather than focusing on their own priorities. A lot of the money goes to expensive foreign contractors and is channeled through parallel systems that sideline local institutions.
Indeed, aid can actually entrench dysfunction when it enables governments to avoid hard political choices or when it props up elites who are not committed to reform.
Ironically, some of the biggest providers of aid are the same ones bleeding the continent dry. Their companies dodge taxes. Their banks host money looted from African countries. Their economies rely on extractive, one-sided trade deals. They manufacture and sell weapons and then use part of the money for humanitarian aid. They give with one hand but take tenfold with the other. As the African expression goes, they are like a mouse that bites then blows air on the wound to mask the injury.
Reality
Africa’s future cannot depend on handouts.
True development is based on African countries using their own resources for the benefit of their people. It requires building strong public institutions, mobilizing domestic resources, investing in regional production and trade, and designing policies that reflect African needs and aspirations rather than donor priorities.
While aid can play a role (particularly in humanitarian settings) its effectiveness will only be felt if it is aligned with African countries’ visions for themselves, supports systems change, and is focused on long-term development.
Stefan Dercon in Gambling on Development correctly notes that aid alone doesn’t generate development. It can only support it, and that’s in cases where there is an internal development bargain (a vision and commitment from political elites toward sustained transformation).
Myth 4: Development is a Technical Process
Development is often treated like an engineering problem with a ready-made blueprint: experts design the “right” policies, consultants draw up action plans, and the job of local actors is to implement. With the right data, planning tools, and a bit of expert coordination, we are good to go.
William Easterly calls this the “planner’s approach” that imagines that development can be delivered like a package: designed in boardrooms, imposed through projects, and measured by neat indicators. It assumes that development is just a matter of getting the technical answers right. If we can find the best models, tools, and hire the best foreign experts, development will naturally follow.
What’s the problem with this approach?
It strips development of its politics and history. It ignores the power dynamics, vested interests, and legacies of inequality that shape how societies are organized and who benefits.
Unsurprisingly, when these approaches inevitably fail to deliver long-term results, the blame is usually placed on poor “implementation” or “lack of capacity” rather than on its flawed assumptions and exclusionary processes.
Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs)
SAPs epitomized the “planner’s approach” in that they were designed by international financial institutions and imposed one-size-fits-all reforms across Africa (and many parts of Latin America and Asia) in the 1980s and 1990s, with little regard for local context or citizen input. Governments were pressured to slash public spending, privatize services, and liberalize markets based on technical models. But rather than deliver development, SAPs deepened poverty, weakened state capacity, and triggered social unrest.
It is worrying that today, the same logic continues under new names like “fiscal consolidation,” “growth diagnostics,” and loan conditionalities which echo the top-down mindset that has failed to deliver in the past.
Reality
Development is not a technical puzzle. It’s a deeply political, social, and historical process.
Development doesn’t work when it’s imposed from the top down. Real progress happens when solutions are driven by those closest to the problems and giving ownership to the people who understand the local context . Instead of rigid plans and external templates, what’s needed are flexible, responsive approaches that emerge from the ground up.
Development should be about listening, testing, and building on what works. It’s about learning by doing, and adapting as you go. This requires being open to uncertainty, learning to be humble and saying “I don’t know but we will find out together.”
Myth 5: Development Means Becoming Like the West
Development is often painted as a one-way street with some countries ahead of others, and those left behind urged to “catch up” by following the same path taken by those ahead. In this sense, we have been led to believe that development means modernizing to become more like Europe or North America: urban skylines, shopping malls, highways, high-tech industries, and liberal institutions.
But here’s the thing: that path is already showing deep cracks.
Western-style development came at a massive cost. It was built on centuries of colonialism, slavery, resource extraction, and environmental destruction. Today, many of these societies are starting to grapple with the by-products of a faulty system: rising inequality, political polarization, and declining mental health. Their model promises freedom and prosperity but increasingly delivers anxiety, division, and ecological collapse.
Why would Africa try to copy a system that’s unraveling under its own contradictions?
This myth leads to policies that erase rather than build on African realities. Traditional knowledge systems are dismissed as outdated. Cities are planned to look “global” instead of serving the people who live in them. Success is measured by how much a country resembles the West and not by whether its people live well, in dignity, and in harmony with nature.
This doesn’t mean that Africa should now swing toward the East instead. The development path followed by countries like China and others in Asia has produced impressive economic growth, but it comes with its own set of pitfalls: environmental degradation, growing inequality, authoritarian governance. African countries must resist the temptation to trade one external model for another.
Urban Planning Frameworks
Urban planning in many African cities is a clear example of how copying Western models of development can do more harm than good. Inspired by external ideals of what a “modern city” should look like, these frameworks chase flashy skylines, perfect grids, and neatly zoned cities. They treat informal settlements as “blights” that need to be eliminated (often through brutal forced evictions) rather than recognizing them as a manifestation of an unmet need for affordable, well-located housing.
In addition to delegitimising the existence of millions of urban dwellers, the quest for “modernity” in building standards and materials is undermining the ability of African cities to adapt to climate change. Local building techniques such as natural ventilation, earth-based materials, and shaded courtyards are sidelined in favor of glass towers and asphalt roads that trap heat and worsen floods.
To read more about human rights within the context of urban planning, please see this publication edited by our Founder, Rashid Abubakar: Human Rights, Rule of Law and the New Urban Agenda
Reality
Africa doesn’t need to become like the West (or the East). It needs to define development on its own terms.
True development will be rooted in African contexts, values, and aspirations. It means designing economies that meet local needs, building institutions that reflect local realities, and using technology in ways that empower communities rather than deepen dependence.
Development doesn’t mean Westernization. Modernization doesn’t mean Westernization. Africa has the chance to build something better: development that is more inclusive, more just and more sustainable.
Myth 6: The Private Sector is the Engine of Development
For years, we’ve been told that the private sector is the key to development. Governments should “get out of the way,” the story goes, and let markets do what they do best: create jobs, drive innovation, and grow the economy. From global institutions to national plans, there’s been a steady push to position private actors as the main drivers of progress.
While the private sector has an important role to play, it’s not a silver bullet, and it’s not always geared toward the public good.
We’ve seen cases where the privatization of basic services like water, education, energy or healthcare has made them more expensive and less accessible to the people who need them most.
In many African countries, the formal private sector is small, highly concentrated, and often dominated by foreign-owned firms. Investments tend to focus on short-term profits rather than long-term societal goals. Much of the capital flows into extractive sectors like mining or oil, with limited local linkages, limited job creation, and little value retained in the economy.
Reality
The private sector is an important part of development in Africa but must not be fronted as a replacement of the public system. The fact that governments may be weak and inefficient only means that more focus should be placed on strengthening them rather than using it as an excuse to further decimate them.
Markets can support development, but they can’t drive it alone. Without clear rules and safeguards, they tend to concentrate wealth, overlook the most vulnerable, and leave essential needs unmet, which is the opposite of what development should achieve.
Inclusive and sustainable development requires a capable, proactive state that can set the rules, protect the commons, and invest in the public goods that markets ignore. It means putting people before profit, and ensuring that business serves society: not the other way around.
Myth 7: Corruption is the Main Reason for Africa's Under-development
Corruption is often presented as the explanation for why Africa remains underdeveloped. It dominates media narratives, and political speeches and donor reports and is used to justify everything from aid conditionalities to structural adjustment programs. The assumption is simple: if African countries could just get rid of corrupt officials, development would follow.
Admittedly, corruption is a real challenge. However, it’s only a manifestation of deeper issues.
Corruption exists across the world including in the countries that often point fingers at Africa. What makes it especially damaging in African contexts is the structural environment in which it operates: weak institutions, external economic pressures, poor public financing, and legacies of colonial governance that never centered public accountability in the first place.
Moreover, blaming corruption alone allows deeper systems of exploitation to go unchallenged. Multinational corporations shift profits through tax havens. Global banks enable money laundering. Foreign actors sign lopsided investment deals that strip countries of their sovereignty. Yet the focus remains almost entirely on African officials without asking who benefits from keeping things as they are.
The narrative also obscures how “anti-corruption” campaigns are often used selectively to silence political opponents, attract donor funding, or distract from more pressing structural reforms.
Reality
Fighting corruption is important but it must go hand-in-hand with transforming the systems that enable and reward it: opaque global finance, unfair trade rules, weak public institutions, and economic models that concentrate power in the hands of a few.
Corruption is a serious problem but it’s a symptom, not the root. The real work is in transforming institutions, economies, and power relations.
The Big Problem: These Myths Shape Policy and Practice
These myths not only distort public understanding of development in Africa, they shape budgets, policies, and funding flows. They influence which voices get heard and which solutions get funded. Most dangerously, they hide the root causes of underdevelopment: colonial legacies, extractive global systems, elite capture, and the absence of inclusive nation-building in most African countries
Time to Redefine Development
These seven myths may differ in form but they share a common flaw: they obscure the structural roots of underdevelopment while presenting narrow, externally driven solutions.
Challenging these narratives is not about denying the real issues Africa faces. It’s about refusing to accept superficial answers, and instead reclaiming the power to define development in ways that centre African agency.
At the Policy Centre for Afrocentric Development (PCAD), we connect the dots between history and present-day policy; between local realities and global systems; and between the root causes of underdevelopment and the real solutions Africa needs.
We believe that development must be anchored in African realities, built on structural understanding, and driven by the needs, values and resources of its own people.
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