Your comment seems to be unnecessarily sweeping - in the sense that Africa is not a single country, but a continent with more countries than there are US states

Your comment seems to be unnecessarily sweeping - in the sense that Africa is not a single country, but a continent with more countries than there are US states. As such there is an enormous range to all of your points, which, with few exceptions, are sufficiently local to make your comment meaningless. It would be the same as sweeping generalisations about the USA that equated new York, ohio, texas and Montana as all being the same place.