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This question is asked every day by African politicians, international agency specialists, workers in non-governmental organisations, and officials in cooperation ministries across the countries in the North and academics throughout the world. Despite the $500 billion invested by African countries and a further $200 billion borrowed over the last four years, Sub-Sahara Africa is the continent plagued by war, where military coups are common, the natural disaster is fatalism and poverty and economic stagnation are the daily reality of millions and millions of citizens. With the backing of the world's rich countries, the International Monetary Fund has joined the World Bank in working with African governments to produce strategies and programmes to reduce absolute poverty. The United Nations finds an echo in international capital when it speaks of the 2020 or 2025 agendas where intelligent partnerships aspire to give the world a new world. Yet the question persists: how to induce development? How to ensure that the investments to be made will have a multiplier effect, so that development becomes endogenous to the continent and the world no longer has to appeal for solidarity and international assistance whenever we are faced with constant, uninvited images of starving children, women dripping with sweat, men armed to the teeth and old people with an empty gaze that transcends death.
Galbraith said that whatever we believe in economics is deeply rooted in history. Only when we understand these roots can we comprehend the present, and at the same time its projection into the future (Galbraith, 1987). So in order to identify the most appropriate strategy for the development of Mozambique, we must go back in time to find out what the past can teach us, and we must study the present to find out what it has in a store for us.
In this paper we will start by looking at the evolution of theoretical reasoning on economic development, as seen in the history of Mozambique. We shall then show what a return to the empirical evidence has revealed about concepts and about models of the economic and social behaviour of rural families, and how this evidence has enriched assumptions that are usually taken for granted. Finally we will present a normative model developed by Cruzeiro do Sul, with which I work, and in the process attempt to answer the question that constitutes the title of this paper - how to induce development in Africa, the case of Mozambique.
Footnote:
- Professor at Eduardo Mondlane University and Director of the Masters Course in Agricultural Development. Researcher with Cruzeiro do Sul - Institute for Development Research.
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