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Regional integration
Launched in 2001, NEPAD aimed to attract aid and investment to African states in exchange for pledges to
liberalize their economies, improve domestic governance and observe the rule of law. In sharp contrast with
the import-substitution agenda that had underwritten the Lagos and Abuja Plans of Action, NEPAD explicitly
stated that re-engagement within the world economy required the establishment of private sector- and citizenfriendly state policies. Not surprisingly this shift, and the creation of the African Peer Review Mechanism as a
specifically African instrument to monitor and benchmark good governance, enhanced NEPADs appeal to
donors and the G8.
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Failed project?
NEPADs record aroused deep scepticism, but its major achievement probably lay elsewhere: it had contributed
to keeping Africa on the global agenda.
Frontier
The revival of perceptions of Africa as a new frontier began in the late 1990s with the discovery of substantial
new oil reserves. By the turn of the 21st century, the combination of technological progress and a favorable
business environment accounted for West Africas depiction as the last large unexplored energy frontier.98
The development of new technology made it possible to tap deep and ultra-deep offshore oilfields, prompting
a reappraisal of the reserves and production potential of the Gulf of Guinea. Extremely favorable business
terms had been negotiated with African states, thanks to depressed oil prices in the 1990s: by 2006, in the
Middle East, an average 3.5% of production was allocated to overseas companies, but in Sub-Saharan Africa
the corresponding figure had grown from 35.4% to 57% between 1995 and 2005
The African oil frontier therefore offered attractive openings to the global industry, although not necessarily to
Africas oil and commodity producing states, given the low prevailing international prices. The prospects for
increased dependency on commodities and extractive resources were discussed in conjunction with notions of
commodity trap (or resource curse), asset stripping or even fatal transactions.
This was not to be the case: international oil and commodity prices began to pick up during 2003, prompting
widespread interest in an increasingly broad range of energy, mineral and agricultural commodities. Indeed,
since worldwide increases in food prices began in 2008, the lure of the worlds largest stock of uncultivated
arable land has triggered another unprecedented movement, this time for the acquisition of land in Africa.
Today, the potential of African domestic markets is continually being reassessed, thanks to their new solvency
and a demography once considered disabling but now deemed highly attractive owing to its market
potential.104 The continent is also associated with spectacular infrastructural rehabilitation and development
projects, not unlike that observed in the aftermath of the first oil boom of the1970s, albeit on a much larger
scale. Once stigmatized as a case of technological apartheid at the dawn of the information age,105 Africa is
regarded as one of the fastest-growing mobile phone markets and a source of major innovation in
communications technology.106 Hence the African frontier can no longer be reduced to a scramble for
commodities or to the inflow of Chinese expatriates and immigrants.107 The go out strategies of the Chinese
and of an expanding range of smaller emerging economies have transformed the frontier into a global arena.