After the Structural Adjustment Programme for Africa’s Economic Crisis What Next? A Look at Some Immediate African Alternative Development Strategies

Abstract

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Sub-Saharan Africa experienced an unprecedented economic crisis shutting the exhilarating expectations of economic stability and development associated with independence. In response to the African abysmal economic decline, the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was introduced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a recovery economic policy for Africa. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, most Sub-Saharan African countries had implemented the programme as conditionality for aid. However, the implementation of these programmes had a massive negative impact on African economies with the problem of balance of payment deficits. With the failure of the structural adjustment programmes, Africans with the support of the United Nations began to look for other alternative economic recovery strategies to address the African economic doldrums. This paper therefore takes a critical look at three of the most immediate alternative development strategies of Africa which includes; the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) and the Abuja Treaty for the establishment of the African Economic Community (AEC) 1980-2000; Africa’s Priority Programme for Economic Recovery 1986 -1990 (APPER) which later became UN Programme of Action for Africa’s Economic Recovery and Development (UN-PAAERD) (1986); and the African Alternative Framework for Structural Adjustment (AAF-SAP) 1989. The paper concludes that post-colonial governments found it very easy to seek for alternative development plans as substitutes for the IMF and World Bank imposed SAPs but such strategies suffered from actual implementations accounting for their failures.