The African Economy: The Growth Century
A free online textbook on African economic development, with 54 country profiles and nine interactive data tools
A freely accessible textbook on African economic development. It is written for students and instructors in economics and public policy; for analysts at development finance institutions, funds and ratings agencies; for African policymakers and entrepreneurs; and for journalists and general readers who want a working model of how African economies grow. Thirty-seven chapters, fifty-four country profiles, and nine interactive tools that read the same numbers the chapters quote.
The argument is that Africa is where the marginal worker and the marginal city of the next fifty years will be found. The book treats the continent as the growth economy of this century, not only as a development problem, and organises it around the systems that cross borders: growth poles, corridors, currency zones, value chains and payment rails.
First edition, September 2026. All thirty-seven chapters are published: the growth identity and the case against it, how Africa works, the nine sectors, the factor markets, distribution, the eight growth poles, the external partners from China to the Gulf, and the futures, with scenarios to 2100 and their assumptions exposed. Every chapter’s numbers were re-run against the country cards before publication. The site receives corrections and updates between editions.
Read
Part I makes the bet: the numbers, the demographic century, the long arc, the case and the counter-case. Part II is how Africa works, from states and informality to money and labour; Part III the nine sectors; Parts IV and V the factor markets and distribution; Part VI the eight growth poles from Lagos–Abidjan to the Great Lakes; Part VII the external partners; Part VIII the futures. Start with Chapter 1.
Explore
Nine tools: the country cards, the identity scoreboard, the Century Slider, the three-card comparison, the growth-pole map, the sovereign debt tracker, Balance-Sheet Africa, the AfCFTA linkage explorer, and the convergence calculator.
The spine, stated on page one of Chapter 1:
GDP growth ≈ growth of output per worker + growth of the employment-to-working-age ratio + growth of the working-age population
About the data. Every figure in Part I is sourced. The country cards carry UN World Population Prospects 2024, IMF World Economic Outlook estimates, World Bank debt and statistical-capacity scores, and a data-quality layer: census year, rebase year, last labour-force survey. A blank is a blank, never a zero.
Teaching with the book
Every chapter ends with three discussion questions, a “Try it” exercise on one of the interactive tools, and a data exercise against the country cards, which can be downloaded as CSV or JSON from the country cards page. The glossary and the key statistics page work as quick references for a course.
How to cite
Wilse-Samson, Laurence. 2026. The African Economy: The Growth Century. First edition. https://lwilsesamson.com/african-economic-future/
Where you quote a statistic, cite the underlying release as well; the vintage of each one is on the About the data page.
A note on AI assistance
The manuscript was prepared with substantial assistance from AI language models, principally Claude (Anthropic), used for drafting, editing, data and country-card scripts, interactive tools, the claim ledger, consistency checking and citation verification. The framework, the argument, the selection of material and the judgments throughout are mine, as is the responsibility for what remains wrong.