Good Governance and Rural Development in Africa

This chapter presents African indigenous knowledge as the missing link in achieving good governance and rural development in Africa. The failure of rural development projects in Africa has mostly been attributed to weak institutions and bad governance. Consequently, good governance has become the cornerstone of donors' development cooperation in Africa since the 1990s. While it is true that African public institutions may be weak, the analysis shows that the West contributed to this problem through European colonization of the continent as well as the imposition of Eurocentric one-size-fit-all reforms of the World Bank on indebted African countries. The chapter argues that to improve governance and rural development in Africa, there are well-established and effective cultural indigenous governance systems in the continent from which we can learn.