Global Focus: Africa

Industry, Governance, and Power in Economic Development

Middle Eastern Structure

Global Focus: Africa is a semester-long program that allows students to participate in in-depth learning and discussion sessions with policy experts to explore the opportunities and challenges of economic development on the African continent. Participants will compare industries within three African nations—South Africa, Kenya, and Côte d'Ivoire—and design and present a realistic development strategy as their final project.

This program is led by Dana Banks, Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. Ms. Banks spent 25 years as a foreign service officer with the U.S. State Department in Washington and on the ground in three African embassies. She served the White House as special assistant to the President and a senior director at the National Security Council. In 2024, she was nominated by the President as U.S. Executive Director of the African Development Bank, and served as senior advisor to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Africa Business Center.

The Moment

The continent of Africa stands at a pivotal moment in its economic trajectory. According to the African Development Bank, the continent's GDP growth is projected to reach 4.3 percent in 2026, outpacing the global average and reflecting a period of genuine macroeconomic momentum. More than 21 African countries are forecast to grow above 5 percent in 2025, and the continent's working-age population is set to expand by more than 620 million people by 2050, representing the largest demographic shift of any developing region in the world.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is the world’s largest trading bloc with 54 participating countries and a combined GDP of $3.4 trillion.  Full implementation could boost continental income by $450 billion and increase exports by $560 billion by 2035. Yet beneath these headline figures lies a more complex story for the African continent, one of capital outflows, persistent debt burdens, and industries whose raw commodity wealth continues to generate limited domestic value. This tension between growth and transformation makes the current moment essential to understand and to examine. 

A Closer Look: South Africa, Kenya, and Côte d'Ivoire

Global Focus: Africa grounds these continental dynamics in three countries chosen for their depth and diversity of perspective:

  • South Africa is the continent's most industrialized economy and provides a cautionary case study in deindustrialization and governance failure.
  • Kenya offers agricultural diversity and significant export capacity but struggles with food sovereignty and limited value-added production, constrained by trade agreements that shape what it can realistically produce.
  • Côte d'Ivoire is the world's largest cocoa producer and one of the AfCFTA's identified high-growth performers. Its efforts to move from raw commodity export toward domestic agro-processing, pharmaceutical production, and energy investment make it one of the most instructive live experiments in deliberate industrial policy on the continent.

Together, these three cases offer a panoramic view of how development works, where it gets stuck, and when employed correctly, has the potential to transform societies and increase economic prosperity.

The Analytical Framework

Rather than framing African development through the familiar lenses of poverty, aid dependency, or aggregate growth statistics, this program teaches students to read industries as power structures. Who controls production? Who captures value along the supply chain? Whose governance decisions determine which industries survive, and which are undermined by trade agreements, investor contracts, or institutional neglect? These are the animating questions of each session. Students will examine how civil service design shapes industrial outcomes, how land governance and infrastructure loans affect policy autonomy, and how basic societal needs, such as food security, clean water, healthcare, and education, are not separate from industrial systems but are, in fact, their direct outputs. The program draws upon a rigorous analytical toolkit developed across development economics, political economy, and institutional theory, and applies it case by case to sectors including agriculture, manufacturing, health production, energy, critical minerals, and digital infrastructure.

Program Structure & Expert Sessions

The program unfolds across five biweekly sessions, each three hours long, held primarily in person at Gettysburg College, with one session in Washington, DC. Each session pairs a single core expert with a specific theme or country focus. The opening session establishes the analytical foundations with a senior economist from a major multilateral development bank, with the program lead framing the experience. Subsequent sessions move through Kenya with an agribusiness and regional trade specialist; to Washington, D.C., for a West Africa trade and industrial policy practitioner anchoring the Côte d'Ivoire session; and back to Gettysburg for a senior fellow in African political economy and governance leading the South Africa discussion. The final session draws on an expert in African development finance and trade policy to examine key industrial sectors, critical minerals, digital systems, and development finance, closing with a thirty-minute synthesis led by the program lead.

Students of all majors and class years are welcome to apply. This seminar may be of particular interest to students in Economics, Business, Political Science, Africana Studies, Public Policy and related majors.

Final Project

The program concludes with a capstone project in which students design and present a realistic development strategy for one of the three countries, focused on a single industry.

Learning Objectives

This program is designed for students who want to reshape their perceptions of African countries as a viable, emerging market, ripe for increased trade and investment, from a continent of lack and underdevelopment. Students will gain a greater understanding of how development really works, and the ecosystem that enables, and sometimes hinders, that development. Ultimately, students will walk away ready to engage in the policy debates that will shape one of the most consequential regions of the twenty-first century.

Program Schedule

Session 1: Industry as Power: How Development Actually Works
Gettysburg | Friday, September 4, 4-6PM

Session 2: Kenya: Agriculture, Trade Constraints, & Food Sovereignty
Gettysburg | Friday, September 18, 4-6PM

Session 3: Côte d'Ivoire: Agro-Processing, Health Production, & Industrial Policy
Washington, D.C. | Friday, October 2, full day

Session 4: South Africa: Deindustrialization, Labor, & Public Service Crisis
Gettysburg | Friday, October 16, 4-6PM

Session 5: The New Industrial Frontier: Minerals, Tech, & Development Finance
Gettysburg | Friday, October 30, 4-6PM

Session 6: Final Presentations
Gettysburg | Friday, November 13, 4-6PM

Attendance at ALL sessions is required.

It is each student's responsibility to ensure that class schedules do not conflict, or to make arrangements with professors to make up work or assessments.

Previous Global Focus Programs

GLOBAL FOCUS is a series of Eisenhower Institute programs designed to help students gain insight and analyze American foreign policy, international relations, emerging economies and regional conflict, cooperation, and competition around the world.

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