Sure they can, even without colonization.
It's just not worth the effort, for the self-sustaining indigenous forces for development are almost free by comparison and more powerful by orders of magnitude.
The question is thus not one of how to push a foreign country to modernity, but whether there's a trigger for making it move towards a certain development direction on its own and how to identify and activate it.
Compare *shameless self-promotion* my text about Germany's post-WW2 recovery, for example */shameless self-promotion*.
A trigger for an average African country - say Zambia - could be to find a way how the powers that be can profit of giving women much more relevance in the non-subsistence economy. Add the Japanese custom of wifes managing family finances (an awesome limiter on alcohol and cigarette consumption as well as whoring), maybe through some African-made movies, bank regulations and the like. This could lead to substantial economic growth.
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