The French Development Agency publishes a rich atlas on Africa. The book allows us to observe the progress made by the continent in recent decades, and to situate it in relation to the rest of the world.
The trajectory of the African continent and its ability to rebound in the face of crises are still unknown or underestimated. Based on this observation, and in order to better understand the geostrategic and development issues related to the continent, AFD (French Development Agency) is publishing its Atlas of Africa. Published at the end of August 2020 by Editions Armand Colin, the work includes more than one hundred unpublished maps and graphics, over 128 pages.
Africa, more than any other continent, has accumulated in a very short time economic development, social transformations, demographic changes, structural reforms and environmental changes of spectacular magnitude.
This atlas, drawn up from mostly unpublished data, as close as possible to the field, traces the news and realities of the continent: those of a plural, dynamic Africa which, in the face of its many challenges, undertakes, innovates for and with his youth.
Through a hundred maps and charts, the fruit of a work of collecting, aggregating data and foresight, the book presents in a concrete and pictorial manner the issues, paradoxes and perspectives of this continent. This atlas is based on the experience of an institution and its teams present in Africa for nearly eighty years.
The work is conceived in three themes. Take the full measure of Africa; a plural continent, shared challenges; Africa inventing itself, meeting the great challenges of tomorrow. The reader can follow indicators of changes in societies over more than half a century.
Thanks to the choice of maps restoring the real proportions of the continent, of graphics allowing to compare data over time to better follow the evolutions, and to restore regional dynamics. “This atlas aims, far from clichés and peremptory assertions, to draw up an informed and attentive inventory of Africa as it is,” explains AFD.
This atlas is prefaced by Vera Songwe. “Today, Africa is asserting itself in the world as a privileged partner which designs and offers new avenues of emergence, by exploiting all of its assets and potential in all their diversity”, writes the secretary. Executive of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa.
A continent-coherence!
For his part, the Director General of AFD “is delighted” by this publication, “the originality of which is based on the” All Africa “approach that the Agency promotes and implements in its operations”.
To change our perspective, this work breaks with a vision of the continent inherited from the West and based on a largely artificial “division” between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa by offering an unprecedented collection of data and scale maps. of the entire continent, to fully appreciate it.
In the era of the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), “our agency was also keen to irrigate this approach with concrete illustrations to understand Africa in the process of being made in all areas”, continues Rémy Rioux. Who cites as examples the fight for equality between women and men or that for the protection of the climate and biodiversity.
In the context of the health crisis that African countries are facing with force and resolution, the Atlas of Africa – AFD will thus help, I hope, to do justice to the emergence of a coherent continent and to strengthen its ties with Europe, in a deep understanding and mutual respect.
For example, the Atlas presents a comparative map of Africa under the criterion of its electrification. This map shows the continent’s major progress.
The share of the population with access to electricity has jumped: between 1990 and 2017, it rose from 29% to 53%, allowing nearly 470 million more Africans to benefit from this energy.
