EFFECTIVE AID STRATEGIES TO SUPPORT DEMOCRACY IN AFRICA By

External actors have long shaped the trajectory of democracy in Africa. During the Cold War, rival superpowers propped up autocrats of different stripes for decades. Toward this end, paradoxically, Western democracies regularly and purposively undermined democratic reformers lest they threaten the hold on power of an autocratic ally. The superpower competition simultaneously sparked and sustained many of Africa’s post-colonial civil wars – the repercussions of which continue to hinder democratization efforts on the continent. The end of the Cold War, in turn, ushered in a period of unprecedented democratic expansion in Africa. Democratic transitions in Eastern Europe and Latin America triggered demands for political liberalization in first a trickle and then a flood of African countries. By 1995, 25 Sub-Saharan African countries had adopted some form of democratic system. By the late 1990s, none of Sub-Saharan Africa’s 48 states retained a de jure one-party state. The monopoly on power that Africa’s ruling parties had held for decades had been broken. Despite these advances, Africa’s democratization experience is still a work in progress – and a fragile one at that. Nearly half of the states in Sub-Saharan Africa remain autocratic in nature. And the neo-patrimonial norms that became entrenched during the Cold War continue to pos