For much of the post-colonial era, Africa’s development model has been deeply entangled with foreign aid. Billions of dollars flowed into the continent’s coffers, financing schools, clinics, roads, and emergency relief efforts. Yet, despite some notable achievements, aid often had unintended consequences – fostering dependency, stunting local innovation, and allowing governance shortfalls to persist without consequence. Today, however, the ground beneath Africa’s feet is shifting, and the continent faces a moment of truth: a forced but necessary march toward true self-reliance.

In 2015, Kenya’s then-president Uhuru Kenyatta articulated a warning that now feels prophetic: Africa could no longer entrust its future to the generosity of external patrons. Prosperity and freedom built on the shaky foundation of foreign aid would never be sustainable. A decade later, Kenyatta’s message has come into sharper focus, as global upheavals – from pandemics to proxy wars – strain the old system and leave Africa with fewer lifelines.

Several powerful forces are colliding at once. The post-COVID global economy has proven more fragile than many believed. Supply chain disruptions, intensifying trade wars between major powers, and the cascading effects of the war in Ukraine have battered Africa, even though the continent played little part in these crises. The model of dependence – with Africa as a patient recipient of charity – simply cannot withstand such turbulence.

At the same time, traditional donors are pulling back. In the United States, aid budgets have been slashed or redirected amid fierce partisan divides and growing voter skepticism about endless international development projects. In Europe, the pressure is even more pronounced. With immigration issues, energy shortages, and war in Eastern Europe dominating domestic politics, African aid no longer commands the urgency it once did.

Diaspora remittances, long a critical........

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