Introduction

Abstract

After two decades of remarkable, if uneven, progress, improvements in the welfare of African children started to falter towards the end of the 1970s. The 1980s witnessed a further deterioration in the economic and social conditions of most households in sub-Saharan Africa, which was starkly reflected in negative trends in income per capita, investment rates, declining social service delivery and child welfare. Despite the radical policy reforms introduced in the 1980s, prospects for the rest of the century remain dismal in the view of most observers, not least for the continued squeeze on the external flow of resources to Africa and the rapid spread of AIDS. However, events which have occurred over the last two years and which are apparently only tenuously connected to Africa’s economic fate may, in fact, be the bedrock of profound, positive changes in the environment within which policies are framed in Africa.