A Critical Appraisal of World Bank’s SAPs and PRSPs in Africa

The official aims of the World Bank development programs-SAPs and PRSPs in Africa and other developing countries are to promote local productivities, to advance economic choices, to improve living standards, to maximize economic competencies, to reduce government expenditures, to encourage private domestic economic sectors, and to realize economic development. Based on these promising development policies, many African countries have adopted those programs in the early 1980s as a panacea to their worst political and economic problems. To this end, some scholars assert that the World Bank development programs-SAPs and PRSPs have contributed a lot to the holistic growth of many African states. They strongly believe that Africa is rising these days because of the direct involvement of the Bretton Woods Institutions (World Bank and International Monetary Fund) in the overall affairs of the African states. On the contrary, some other researchers oppositely argue that the World Bank development programs did not achieve their own intended goals and they have brought negative consequences on the social, political, and economic situations of Africa. Accordingly, this study critically examines the effectiveness of the World Bank development programs-SAPs and PRSPs in contemporary Africa. Moreover, the study rationally appraises the multi-dimensional consequences of SAPs and PRSPs in the land of Africa. To this effect, the study finds that these programs of the World Bank have brought massive socio-political and economic crises in the land of Africa. Hence, rethinking the World Bank development programs should be the prior duty of African states to escape from the existing chaos in almost every sector. Finally, in doing this study, the researcher relied on secondary sources of data such as published scientific articles, books, unpublished dissertations, newspapers, magazines, and reports of governmental and non-governmental organizations.