Africa: the underrated continent

In the popular mind Africa is often reduced to two pictures — poverty and wildlife. Both are not so much false as hopelessly incomplete, and that incompleteness costs those who, because of it, fail to see the whole.

It is enough to look at the numbers without stereotypes. Africa is the youngest continent on the planet: half the population is under twenty. It is a huge market, growing cities, mobile technologies that in places outrun the “developed world.” A continent many have mentally left in the past in fact lives, in many ways, in the future.

There is a flip side worth naming honestly: youth is both energy and risk. Many people without work are either an engine of growth or a source of instability, depending on whether they are given opportunities. Africa is neither a “problem” nor a “rescue,” but a vast space of choice whose outcome is not yet decided.

My opinion: whoever looks at Africa today with curiosity and respect, rather than from above, will prove more far-sighted than most. The underrated is almost always the under-invested; and history favors those who saw it before the others.