2 Understanding African Poverty: Beyond the Washington Consensus to the Millennium Development Goals Approach

he era of structural adjustment, which can be dated approximately to the last two decades of the twentieth century, was a failure for African economic development. Africa was the only major developing country region with negative per capita growth during 1980 to 2000; its health conditions are by far the worst on the planet; its soaring population is exacerbating ecological stresses; and despite the policy-based development lending of structural adjustment, it remains mired in poverty and debt. What went wrong? In the extreme interpretation of the Washington Consensus by its proponents, as well as by its critics, its unambiguous promise is that if a developing country were to implement conservative macroeconomic policies while expanding the role of the private market at the expense of the state, then it would achieve sustained high growth rates on its own. By extension, if a developing country is failing to grow, the problem must be either macroeconomic mismanagement or a hindering of the private market expansion in the country, usually attributed to corruption or more broadly “bad governance”