Africanistan Development or Jihad

While progress in Africa can be seen across the board, every day-migrants are dying in the Mediterranean. The continent is in fact a powder keg. The powder is demographics. And the detonator is unemployment. What is worrying for the continent is even more dramatic for the Sahel, a huge region of about 100 million inhabitants, where insecurity is spreading and which may act as a detonator for West Africa with a population of 700 million in 25 years. The mass unemployment of young people far more than jihadist propaganda, is the primary explanation for the dramatic collapse of Afghanistan. Despite major differences in geography and culture, there are huge similarities between the Sahel and Afghanistan, increasing insecurity, drug trafficking, and the spread of radical Islam being the most worrisome. Unfortunately the same recipes that failed in Afghanistan are again being rolled out in the Sahel. Without a radical change in the international community's behaviour, we will soon be confronted with, first, a 'Sahelistan' and then an 'Africanistan,' an African Afghanistan, but five- or ten-times worse.

Serge Michailof had an exceptional career as a development practitioner, successively preparing development projects in Latin America, South Asia, and North Africa in an engineering firm, managing technical teams in Africa and Asia for the French Development Agency (AFD) as country director and later as the head of operations, negotiating development programmes and policy reforms at the World Bank as a senior advisor and regional director. For ten years, he was an associate professor at the Paris School of International Affairs (Sciences Po) in Paris and the Sorbonne. He is currently an associate researcher at IRIS (Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques), the leading think tank on geopolitics in Paris, and a senior fellow at the FERDI foundation (Fondation pour les Etudes et la Recherche en Développement International). He is a board member of the CIAN (Conseil des Investisseurs Français en Afrique) and the GRET (Groupe de Recherche et d'Echanges Technologiques), one of the leading French NGOs. He is a regular consultant on fragile states and post-conflict reconstruction, working for governments and international agencies, with a specific focus on institution- and state-building. During his 50-year carrier he has worked in 65 different countries on all continents. Serge Michailof studied in France (MBA at HEC, PhD in Economics, MA in Anthropology) and in the US (MIT).