What are the African people asking from their governments?

Development cooperation must be firmly grounded in the needs of low- and middle-income countries. What people in these countries define as their most pressing challenges is therefore a key question for any donor country.

The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) recently made an effort to better understand what people in Africa see as the most important challenges for their countries in the coming years. The initiative was part of Norad’s Rethinking Development project (Bistand Mot 2030), which sought to analyze important and emerging trends within international development cooperation. Roundtable discussions and interviews were organized in five African countries and supplemented with survey findings. Key messages and contributions from participants and experts across the continent were summarized in the report Old problems and new realities in Africa – and the role of development cooperation.

What answers you get when you ask people about the most important development challenges for their countries may depend on whom you ask. While Norad’s roundtable discussions and interviews mainly were with researchers and other knowledge providers, their views are not necessarily representative of those of the broader population.

In this paper, we therefore look at what we can learn from larger and more representative studies. We report what ordinary people in sub-Saharan Africa say in response to the question “What are the most important problem for your government to address?”, which has been asked by the Afrobarometer surveys in countries across the African continent. We disaggregate the Afrobarometer data to assess how priorities differ across groups, e.g., people with low vs. high socio-economic status, low-income countries vs. middle-income countries, urban vs. rural residents, young vs. old, and male vs. female.

In addition, we report findings from the last round of World Bank Opinion Surveys, which ask development professionals at the national level to identify the most important development problems in their countries.