Africa Was Never Waiting: The End of USAID and What Comes Next

What the book is

Africa Was Never Waiting is a reformer’s analysis of the end of USAID and what it means for Africa and the development world, written from inside the African development system. It is not a defence of USAID, and it is not a celebration of the shutdown. It holds both things at once: the dismantlers were right about a real problem and wrong about the solution, and the sector defended the agency too long without confronting what was broken.

The governing spirit of the book is the Shona phrase chema une tariro, to cry with hope.

The vantage

Almost every other account of the USAID shutdown will be written by Americans looking outward. This one is not. The book is written from an African vantage, specifically a Zimbabwean and Southern African one, from Pretoria and with a working line to Lagos. That position is the point. It lets the book see USAID not as a donor that left, but as one actor in a market that was always larger than aid.

What it argues

The book closes with two chapters addressed in turn, first to the development world and then to Africa, on a shared premise: that nothing of USAID’s scale is coming back. The forward argument is that African markets and private capital are the future. Not because they are adequate substitutes for everything USAID did, but because the alternative is waiting for a return that is not coming.

About the author

Evans K. Chinembiri writes from between Lagos, Lusaka and Pretoria, where he has spent sixteen years inside the Southern African development system: six years on staff at USAID Southern Africa, five implementing donor-funded projects across twelve countries, and a period in Lusaka co-leading the launch of the Water and Soil Accelerator at IWMI. His ongoing research is at North-West University. Africa Was Never Waiting is an independent project, and the Baobab Observer newsletter is where he develops its argument in public.