Right to development: ‘shining the light’ on Africa

Abstract

Africa has been described as the ‘dark continent’. The darkness comes from the fact that looking at Africa from the global satellite images, it is mostly surrounded by darkness compared to other continents of the world. It is also common knowledge that there is energy poverty in Africa. In fact, the World Bank president, Jim Yong, described the African situation of lack of energy as being equivalent to ‘energy apartheid’. A term so difficult to contemplate in the circumstances, it depicts the developmental challenges facing the African continent. In the last decade, Africa has been making a significant shift towards dealing with its energy crisis, which is particularly of vital importance to development. In doing so, it has become imperative to underline the correlation between energy and development. At the core of this interface is people-driven development, a concept intricately linked to the right to development (RTD) that Africa specifically guarantees in the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR, also referred to as the African Charter) The RTD has in the last 30 years of its adoption by the African Charter and the United Nations (UN) Declaration on the Right to Development moved from a controversial human right whose content is unclear to an African agenda significantly contributing to what may be referred to as a new development model on the continent. Currently, there is a shift led by the African Union’s development model in the form of Agenda 2063, which makes a decisive shift from pure economic growth for the countries to a people-oriented development agenda, sustaining a theory of well-being in which core issues, such as energy, form a vital feature of the socio-economic development of the people.