If you don't put energy and infrastructure first, nothing else will follow. This raises an immediate issue: Western economies are still largely fossil-fuel-rel

If you don't put energy and infrastructure first, nothing else will follow. This raises an immediate issue: Western economies are still largely fossil-fuel-reliant and there is no way Africa can start burning fossil fuels at the rate the USA does. Ignoring the pollution and climate aspects, there simply isn't enough fossil fuel production for that scenario. This means step one - securing the energy needed to support infrastructure and industrialization - must involve a renewable-centric approach, and given that Africa is centered around the equator, that means mainly solar (plus some wind and of course storage). The only country with the capacity to provide solar PV at scale is China, as they've mastered monocrystalline silicon PV production. This is already happening (June 2023): https://www.pv-tech.org/china-offers-66gw-of-solar-infrastructure-to-south-africa/ https://www.pv-tech.org/china-offers-66gw-of-solar-infrastru... Once the energy infrastucture is in place, everything else follows from that. Water can then be pumped long distances or from aquifers to combat intermittent drought conditions; railroads can be built to move goods long distances efficiently, and factories for conversion of raw materials to manufactured goods for export, aka moving up the value chain, can be built. Similarly, malaria was defeated in the USA because of infrastructure, not by genetically engineered mosquitos or similar schemes - malaria is a solved problem. This article doesn't even mention the energy issue, it just trots out some revamped version of what, cheap labor in economic zones controlled by foreign investors? And we don't need to educate that labor for the simple tasks they will be given? Listen to this: > "The belief that increasing educational provision is the key to unlocking prosperity in Africa is therefore incorrect. African economies instead need market opportunities to make use of their abundant human capital..." I think that used to be called the African slave trade... so what's the author saying, instead of exporting slaves to the West they can just move the sweatshop factories to Africa, now that China is off the table for the neoliberal outsourcing program?