As many authors know, book projects often grow out of coincidences, those chance encounters and experiences that stem from one’s upbringing or personal background. Even by these standards, the genesis of How Africa Works by Joe Studwell is a striking story.
On the book’s first page, Studwell declares that he never intended to write on its topic and that it had begun as a mistake. Mistake perhaps, but no ordinary one. As Studwell relates, in 2016, he was invited separately by the governments of Ethiopia and Rwanda to assess their development strategies and present his findings to senior officials. Their interest had been primed by a series of popular and well-received books Studwell had written, dating back to the early 2000s, about economic growth in East Asia (especially China), where he had worked as a business journalist.
The same year he was approached by two of Africa’s fastest-growing countries, Studwell ran into Bill Gates, who was already familiar with his writing. Gates told him, “What I’d really like to know is what you think about Africa.” Studwell says he gave this little thought at the time, but that “two years later, after finishing a doctoral thesis and a bit of reading about Africa, I decided that perhaps I should see if I could say something useful about the continent,” a part of the world he calls “the last great frontier of global development.”
