Quote Originally Posted by Fuchs View Post
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.
I'm sure it could, but the probability of these changes being successfully introduced or imposed by an outside power approaches zero.

The re-development of Germany and Japan post WW2 may have been supported by external resources, but it would be an enormous stretch to say they were "developed" purely through external intervention, and any comparison to efforts to externally impose development, modernization, etc in environments where these did not previously exist will be strained beyond any possible utility. Re-modernizing and re-industrializing a modern industrial state that has seen the physical basis for modernity destroyed by conflict is a fundamentally different problem than modernizing and industrializing a state that has never known modernity and industry. The former is, essentially, a problem of engineering and finance. The latter is not.