Between now and 2036, sixteen African countries will have their current development visions expire and will be looking to write new ones. If Africa does not learn the right lessons, we risk once again producing impressive paper tigers instead of emulating the Asian tigers.
One of the hallmarks of Asia’s extraordinary development over the last 7 decades has been their ability to develop comprehensive long-term development plans and to stick to them. Japan’s MITI and China’s five-year plans are among the most famous and most successful. African nations have followed suit. Yet all of them seem to have, at best, underwhelmed, if not failed entirely. What is wrong with Africa that we are unable to take a long-term vision, break it down into a viable plan that we can hold ourselves accountable to and subsequently implement?
Planning is critical for development; resources are not infinite, policy needs direction and the private sector needs to understand where to invest. Yet when you look across the continent, from the AU to local governments, development visions abound. Yet results do not, what are we doing wrong, what should we be doing better and if we can’t get it right should we even bother at all?
What’s wrong with African visions and what can we learn from Asia
So what did Asian nations such as Japan, South Korea and China do that has made them successful?
- Responsibility and accountability
Who writes it matters. If there is a planning ministry, make it the responsible author and build its capacity. Only a strong institution can drive a vision over time across political actors. Consultation and outside expertise matter but not at the expense of responsibility and accountability.
Coupled with this is making people accountable and responsible for achieving the targets we set out to achieve. Without this, plans are just lots of words on lots of paper. In China, the ability to achieve (or over-achieve) on plans is critical for advancement of your career in government. National government funding is pegged to a provincial or local government’s ability to achieve its targets. Failure to reach your targets is interrogated and people are held accountable and cheating to achieve those targets is punished. Put simply, people’s jobs and careers must be tied to the targets that are set for their ministry, municipality, local government or institution.
- Don’t make plans for things you don’t control
Plans must be focused on utilising elements of policy, law and capital that governments control and can leverage to achieve results. In Japan, MITI could direct investment because it rationed foreign exchange and steered the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program. China directs capital investment through state banks, state-owned enterprises, land allocation and the deployment of people through the cadre system. Many African visions set targets they have no hope of controlling such as assuming that PPPs or the private sector will fund a portion of the objectives, such as Tanzania at roughly 70%[1], or Uganda at 30.4%[2] of NDP IV. Wishing and praying for private sector investments or PPPs is not a plan. African governments must take a cold hard look at what resources and levers they control and own and utilise those; the private sector will follow if there is growth and profit to be made.
- Encourage innovation, learn from failure
A unique and powerful element of the planning and development cycle in China is that innovation is encouraged and failure is learned from. Provincial and local governments are given latitude in how they go about achieving their targets. They can experiment with policy, tax incentives, subsidies and public-private partnerships. If these experiments fail, they are not punished; they are interrogated: what worked, what didn’t. Then they iterate, learning from success and failure, and as they iterate, they scale. This process drives innovation, collaboration and eventually scale. If Africa is to succeed, we need to learn to experiment, to fail and to iterate like China.
- Consensus is critical
For a multi-year vision to succeed, there must be consensus. Among the political class that this is the direction we want to go. Buy-in from the bureaucracy that this plan must be executed. Collaboration with a private sector that has understood the plan and the benefits it can drive for them. And most critically understanding and approval from the wider populace of the plan and the positive impact it will have on their lives. Without consensus, politicians and policy makers will ignore plans and change policy midstream and the private sector will not invest behind it.
- Long-term visions are frameworks, short-term are the plan
In China and Japan, the five-year plans are the flagships. The longer-term 15-year visions are frameworks. In Africa, the long-term 20+ year visions are the prescriptive framework, and the five-year plans are derived from those. This leaves little room for the flexibility and experimentation that is key, and it undermines any ability to hold civil servants or politicians who won’t be in that office in 20 years accountable or responsible. To succeed, Africa must flip its planning process: long-term visions should be a framework, a broad vision of what and where we want to be. The short-term (e.g. 5-year) plans must be focused, concrete plans that hold specific offices and people accountable and devote real resources and policy tools to their achievement.
- Make hard choices
Trying to be everything to everyone means the plan means nothing to everyone. Good plans prioritise, and they are clear about why. African visions try to take everyone to heaven.
Get serious or get out of the way
The majority of African countries have some sort of national development vision or plan. Other than isolated cases such as Rwanda, none of them are on track to achieve those plans in any sort of meaningful way that transforms their citizens’ lives as envisioned. As African countries embark on writing their development visions for the next 20-30 years, they must restructure the process of how they are written to ensure that they are written by people empowered to do so, that they are clear, focused, realistic, accountable and measurable. No more aspirational documents with vague inspirational language.
If we cannot change how African planning is done and executed, we will continue to waste time and money. Time and money which would be better spent having no plan at all and focusing on delivering key services and infrastructure and letting people and the private sector do what they will. Either Africa gets serious, or it gets out of the way.
[1] https://ticgl.com/tanzania-budget-2026-27-does-the-first-fydp-iv-budget-honour-the-70-30-private-investment-promise/
[2] https://www.finance.go.ug/media-center/news-and-updates/presentation-fourth-national-development-plan-ndpiv-parliamentary