On December 20, the Kenyan researcher David Ndii published an article entitled “The experience infrastructure-led growth in Africa is running out of steam. It's time to focus on farming ”. It has prompted Africa to turn away from the credo of donors over the past two decades in favor of infrastructure development and adopt that of agriculture.

In 2010, the trend was launched by a : "Bookman Old Style”, "Serif"">World Bank who estimated the economic costs of Africa's infrastructure deficit at 2.2 percentage points of per capita income growth per year. The Ndii study estimated that the investment needed to close the gap would amount to about $93 billion per year from 2010 to 2020, or nearly $1 trillion in cumulative. According to him, over the past two decades, average incomes in Africa have indeed increased by an average of 40%. But the trend is currently running out of steam, giving way to a worrying debt situation, long before the Covid pandemic was triggered.

David Ndii believes that Africa's real economic constraint is its low agricultural productivity, particularly because of the persistence of small-scale agriculture. For him, “Africa's economic take-off depends on agricultural transformation that favors the poor.”