The answer is capitalism. Unfortunately in most of Africa corruption prevents it from actually doing its thing properly. I don’t know how anyone can honestly look at India and china and say anything else. Excellent governance is useless without money and most people know how to use their own money to further their own life if given capital and opportunity, thus capitalism is the solution.
Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.
The problem is not that corruption prevents capitalism from working. The problem is that capitalism doesn't prevent corruption. Corruption is enabled because of capitalism, and any measures to curb corruption will also interfere with capitalism.
I spoke to a local director of a mineral mine in Tanzania. He told me that all of the profits of the mine go to the chinese owners who invested into the mine. That's capitalism at work. The corruption here is (if any) that local officials who brokered the deal allowed this deal to go through without making sure that at least some of the profits remain in the country. It is not even clear that corruption is the cause here. It may well be that the investors simply demanded that much and the locals thought that that would be the best they could get.
In my opinion most of the profits from mining should remain in the country. Those minerals are Tanzanias wealth, that they should use to build up their own country. But capitalism demands that investors make as much profit as possible, disregarding side benefits. So no, capitalism is not the answer.
This is an oversimplification, adopting "capitalism" wholesale as a developing nation without guardrails is incredibly risky because foreign capital will just buy out or crush native industries. The way China actually succeeded was by adopting state capitalism and implementing incredibly strong protectionist measures to ensure domestic growth, not by opening the floodgates to a pure free market.
> Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.
Not limiting yourself to an ideological bubble is actually a good thing, regardless of what website you're on.
> most people know how to use their own money to further their own life if given capital and opportunity, thus capitalism is the solution
I didn't know that "giving capital and opportunity" to people is inherent to capitalism. My understanding of capitalism is, that if people have money, they can "use their own money to further their own life", but capitalists avoid giving money to other people unless the return on investment is greater than 1.
Anyone who disagrees should consider why you’re on a venture capitalist website.