Capstone introduction - Research Paper Example

There are a number of factors which have affected Africa’s growth and caused it to remain behind. These are as follows; Education Education is the edification of one’s mind with knowledge, skills and even wisdom. In the modern world, education usually takes both formal and informal formats with formal education being the main form of education in today’s world. Despite Africa having a great number of people, most of them young, most of these are not educated. Africa has some of the highest numbers of uneducated and completely illiterate people (Bridges, 2007).

Even most of multinational businesses corporations in Africa have to depend on outside countries for experts in different countries. According to Benson, Gospel and Zhu (2013), education is an integral and vital part of the development process. Africa remain the least educated continent, even after the massive missionary work in the previous hundred years which focused on delivering education, healthcare and religions. Education in Africa is linked with economic prosperity. Only the wealthy can access useful education and only the educated can access wealth.

This has left the continent being a continent of one billion extremely poor people and ten thousand billionaires. While the gap between the wealthy and the people is a major concern in almost any economy even in developed countries such as USA and United Kingdom, Africa has the greatest rift between the rich and the poor and this gap has been caused by the education Gap (Curaj, 2012). Most rich people in Africa are those whose families were lucky enough to access education in the pre-colonial era.

These were mainly families which sided with colonial masters while the freedom fighters were in the forest fighting for the emancipation of their countries. Freedom fighters and their families never had an opportunity to get education and the wealth-education-wealth cycle never got to them. This has affected the continent ever since. Politics Political affects the way a country develops. Good democratic structures help a country to be able to take advantage of its resources and also to be able to help in overcoming its challenges.

This is why politics is directly attached to leadership structures. Politicians are at the forefronts of a country’s leadership and therefore affect the way that country is going to develop, or not develop. It goes without saying that Africa is one of the youngest, or constitutes some of the youngest democracies in the world (Obiyan & Amuwo, 2012). In fact, most countries in the African continent can rarely be regarded as democracies. This lack of good political structures perpetuates the issues discussed above.

Poor politics means corruption, which will prevent the poor from being able to access resources such as education (Obiyan & Amuwo, 2012). Poor political therefore has helped in maintaining the status quo, which means the maintenance or even expansion of the gap between the rich and the poor in Africa. As Faringer (1991) argues, corruption in many governments in Africa has meant that a few African leaders are prostituting African resources to other countries which mean that African resources only benefit a few already rich African people while the majority continue to suffer.

These resources are then exported to other countries where they are used to benefit foreigners. Neo-colonialism Neo-colonialism is termed as a