P. Thandika Mkandawire

Charles Chukwuma Soludo

Our Continent, Our Future presents the emerging African perspective on this complex issue. The authors use as background their own extensive experience and a collection of 30 individual studies, 25 of which were from African economists, to summarize this African perspective and articulate a path for the future. They underscore the need to be sensitive to each country's unique history and current condition. They argue for a broader policy agenda and for a much more active role for the state within what is largely a market economy. Finally, they stress that Africa must, and can, compete in an increasingly globalized world and, perhaps most importantly, that Africans must assume the leading role in defining the continent's development agenda.

African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment

Our Continent, Our Future

Adebayo O. Olukoshi

No one can fail to be aware of the incredible impact that the IMF and the World Bank have had on Africa. Their structural adjustment programmes were deliberately designed to shock African economies into free market reform and ensuing stability. But when `getting the prices right' first swamped the World Bank's African economic plans in the early 1980s, few bothered to analyse the politics of a reform package whose immediate impact was violent and unsettling. While Africa has come a long way since then, the goal of market reform must be as important as the task of understanding the politics of unleashing the forces of the market. Not least, is the question of democratisation, which the Bank itself now attempts to force through with loan conditions. This book is the culmination of intense debate by African authors across the continent. Three sections make up a comprehensive analysis of adjustment regimes, their perspectives and the political context in which they have survived, or not. Country case studies in both anglophone and francophone Africa round up the analysis.

The Politics of Structural Adjustment in Africa

Between Liberalisation and Oppression

Compiled in response to the World Bank's controversial two-volume evaluation study on Adjustment in Africa' and the need for critical appraisal of the Structural Adjustment Programme's development strategies, the essays included here touch on issues which have been accorded very little attention in the SAP framework, as well as those which have generated the most controversy. These include an evaluation of the methodologies for performance evaluation under SAP, financial sector reforms and resource mobilisation, poverty under adjustment, trade liberalisation, and more.'

P. Thandika Mkandawire

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