Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump told a group of African leaders that the United States would be “shifting from aid to trade.” Washington had already begun to close USAID, the world’s biggest development agency, and many U.S. allies followed suit, cutting their own aid programs in Africa.

Amid the humanitarian cuts, however, international business interest in Africa is growing. The continent possesses huge reserves of the critical minerals the world needs. Foreign investors are eyeing Africa’s young workforce, growing consumer base, and ports located along vital global trade routes. And competition among China, the United States, Europe, India, and the Gulf states is bringing a wider array of investors than ever before. This year, roughly half of the world’s 20 fastest-growing economies are likely to be African.

Yet these gains won’t be distributed evenly across the continent. Many countries are too unstable, underdeveloped, or corrupt to attract foreign capital and will likely stay trapped in stagnation. But the ones that attract sustained outside investment and cultivate their domestic economies could see tremendous growth—and have a chance to follow the industrialization models that turned Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan into leading markets in the twentieth century. Those African countries that undertake sustained reforms might prosper long enough to provide vast new opportunities for their people and accrue real geopolitical power.

Africa remains a relatively small player in the global economy. It makes up about 20 percent of the world’s population but accounts for just three percent of GDP and three percent of global trade. Over the past quarter century, foreign direct investment across sub-Saharan Africa has remained relatively flat—around two to three percent as a share of GDP—and most of it has gone to extracting oil, diamonds, and gold and other minerals.

But certain countries and regions are growing quickly. Take southern Africa, which has relatively good interstate infrastructure and low barriers to trade, although many nontariff barriers still exist. Twelve countries in southern Africa have a power pool that connects their grids and allows them to buy and sell electricity among one another, leading to greater efficiency and reliability. The region is also home to the world’s oldest running customs union—made up of Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Namibia, and South Africa. The five countries coordinate trade policy, share customs revenue, and implement a common external tariff. Mature freight and logistics networks increasingly connect the mineral belts in the continent’s southern center to ports on both African coasts. These institutions do not fully eliminate the difficulties of doing business across borders, but they allow investors to think in terms of regional rather than merely national markets. Reforms and efforts to connect are paying off in this part of the continent: Botswana and Zambia are set to grow by 4.7 and 4.3 percent this year, respectively.

Further north, Nigeria, with its vast entrepreneurial ecosystem and growing interest from investors, gives West Africa huge market scale. Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda form an increasingly valuable East African commercial core. Some smaller African states are thriving: the island nation of Mauritius has developed into an international financial center. Botswana and Rwanda have attracted investment by providing stable policymaking environments, making up for limited scale.

The continent as a whole also has enormous opportunities on its horizon. Favorable demography gives many African countries a potential advantage. As advanced economies grow........

© Foreign Affairs