![]() Roughly 80 percent of them live on less than two dollars a day. But these countries are also home to roughly 135 million ordinary people trying to live in dignity, raise families, and avoid succumbing to premature death. ![]() They are beset by jihadist terror attacks, kidnappings, and massacres, and have seen seven coups d’état and thirteen coup attempts since 2010. The countries of the Sahel, the bone-dry expanse along the Sahara’s southern edge, including Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad, are among the world’s most unstable. Many African countries report impressive economic growth rates of 6 or 7 percent, but this largely benefits a tiny elite-mainly those involved in oil and mineral extraction and recipients of lucrative and often corruptly administered government contracts. Factories, service companies, and other modern industries are scarce. None are made in Africa, even though some of the materials used to produce them are mined there. Forty percent of the components in Samsung’s phones are made in once-impoverished, war-torn Vietnam. Crowded streets and informal markets from Dakar to Mombasa teem with hawkers selling candles, batteries, matches, toys, condoms, plastic cups, nylon wedding gowns, fake jewelry, and other cheap imports, but the region itself manufactures almost nothing. What is wrong with Africa? Of the world’s twenty-five poorest countries, twenty-one lie south of the Sahara.
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