African Voices on Structural Adjustment: A Companion to our Continent, our Future

The publication of a two-volume evaluation study on “Adjustment in Africa” by the World Bank in 1994 sparked off major controversies and re-ignited the debate about the direction(s) of Africa’s development. For most African scholars who live in and study these economies, the World Bank reports were yet another major disjuncture between reality and dogma. The urge to provide a critical response to the reports in order to straighten the issues was irresistible. The need for such critical appraisal of the structural adjustment program (SAP) as a development strategy provides the immediate rationale for this project. Furthermore, the failures of SAP, the simplistic diagnosis and highly tendentious performance evaluation of the 1994 report, as well as the seemingly changed environment that is more permissive of alternative viewpoints have convinced Africans to “re-enter” the debate. There is a growing call for “local ownership” of adjustment and for Africans to assume the leading role in defining the continent’s development agenda. There was thus the broader goal of Africans reclaiming the initiative and providing a framework for thinking Africa out of the current economic crisis. A careful reading of the writings of African scholars on the subject indicates a discernible trend in terms of an emerging perspective. The perspective derives from the failures of SAPs as well as lessons of experience on what kinds of policies are required, which ones can work, and what kind of issues should be addressed. It is also a perspective that is informed by the lessons derivable from the experiences of other, more successful economies, especially in Asia, and in fuller appreciation of the constraints and opportunities offered by the new and continuously evolving international environment. A second but no less important goal of the project is thus to sift such perspective in a volume as a way of initiating and advancing continued dialogue on those issue.