ISBN : 9780199485666
In Africa, progress can be seen across the board. Yet is this upturn sustainable? And is it comprehensive enough? Every day, migrants are dying in the Mediterranean. Should we really believe that all is well? The continent is in fact a powder keg. The powder is demographics. And the detonator is unemployment. By 2050, the number of young people of working age in Africa will be three times that of China's. What jobs will be available? What is troubling for the continent is even more dramatic for the Sahel, a huge region of about 100 million inhabitants where insecurity is spreading like a bushfire. The mass unemployment of young people, far more than jihadist propaganda, is the primary explanation for the dramatic collapse of Afghanistan. Despite major differences in geography and culture, there are huge similarities between the Sahel and Afghanistan: a demographic impasse, stagnating agriculture, widespread rural misery, high unemployment, deep ethnic and religious fault lines, weak
List of Figures Foreword by Paul Collier Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part One: Sub-Saharan Africa: The End of Euphoria 1. The New Threats to Africa's Stability and Growth 2. Programmed Demographic Explosion in the Sahel? 3. Marginalization and Underemployment in Rural Africa 4. Will Africa Skip the Industrial Development Stage? Part Two: Fragile States at the Eye of the Storm 5. What Causes Fragility in Certain States? 6. Weak Institutions Weaken Fragile States 7. The Ignored Fragility of Cote d'Ivoire and its Descent into Hell: 1980-2012 Part Three: Lessons the Sahel Can Draw from Afghanistan 8. Is the Sahel in the Process of Turning into a New Afghanistan? 9. Afghanistan-Lesson One: Security Cannot be Entrusted for Long to Foreign Forces 10. Afghanistan-Lesson Two: Aid Agencies Cannot be Left to Do as they Please 11. Afghanistan-Lesson Three: In fragile States, the Priority is to Build Modern, Efficient, Sovereign Institutions Part Four: What Is
to Be Done? 12. Applying the Lessons of the West's Failure in Afghanistan to the Sahel: Part 1 13. Applying the Lessons of the West's Failure in Afghanistan to the Sahel: Part 2 Conclusion Epilogue: How the World Has Changed a Lot in Some Ways and Hardly At All In Others. Afterword Acknowledgements
