Africa needs to create a new development model that better connects its businesses with local communities in order to escape the current system which has left as it burdened by high unemployment and underdevelopment.

Current development models are a product of colonization and were designed to extract its resources with the bulk of the value realized abroad, Hippolyte Fofack, a former chief economist and director of research at the African Export-Import Bank, is a research associate at the Harvard University Center for African Studies says in a research paper.

“Connecting with history and bridging the philosophical and cultural discontinuity between Africa’s past and present is fundamental to closing the gap between actual output and potential and setting the region on the path to lasting prosperity,” he says. “More than any other region of the world, political and economic management in Africa has been underpinned by a highly extroverted model of institutional governance, by institutional models that are largely alien.”

Africa has some of the highest unemployment and poverty rates in the world led by its largest economies, Nigeria and South Africa with rates above 30 percent. Fofack says poverty is now an African problem whereas in the 1970s it was an Asian problem because Asia was able to largely preserve its philosophical and cultural heritage.

While in 1970 over 80% of the world’s poor lived in Asia, by 2000, 75% of the world’s poor lived in Africa, he says. Recent estimates would probably be higher, he adds, citing his own research and that of Tetteh Baah, an economist with the Global Poverty and Inequality Data team at the World Bank.

“This stickiness of the colonial development model amid shifting geographical patterns of trade raises serious obstacles in the quest for a more prosperous and climate-resilient future for Africa,” Fofack says.

The International Monetary Fund says sub-Saharan growth will reach 3.8 percent this year, slightly higher than the 3.4 percent attained last year, with nearly two thirds of the region anticipating higher expansion. But it still faces high borrowing costs, climate change and global external shocks it can do little about.

While the fund suggests the continent needs more support from international partners and further implementation of structural reforms to diversify funding sources and economies, Fofack argues should fundamentally rethink its reliance on multinational companies for its development.

“Only in that way can Africa’s business model be sustainable and find success in resolving our debilitating development paradox, wherein the world’s most resource-rich continent has been made to believe that it is the poorest,” he says.

“Insufficient emphasis on philosophy and intellectual leadership in Africa has caused policymaking across the region to be reduced to managing balance of payments crises, aggravated by the colonial development model of resource extraction, far removed from the desired projection into the future shaped by Africa’s history and foundational roots.”