Building Africa's Capacity to Thrive
In the same generation that saw global extreme poverty fall by more than 60 per cent, Africa moved in the opposite direction.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s share of the world’s extremely poor rose from 14 per cent in 1990 to 67 per cent by 2024. Today, nearly half a billion people on the continent live below the poverty line — not because Africa lacks resources, ideas, or ambition, but because the systems, strategies, and institutions designed to support Africa’s development have been built around the wrong diagnosis.
The dominant approach has treated Africa’s challenges as a series of separate emergencies to be managed: poverty to be reduced, climate shocks to be adapted to, disease to be contained, conflict to be resolved. It has produced a continent that is better at surviving than it needed to be, and far less capable of thriving than it should be.
In 2026, the African Resilience Institute was established to change that.
Registered in Cameroon with a pan-African operational mandate, ARI conducts rigorous research, supports evidence-based policymaking, and helps African governments and institutions build the structural foundations of durable prosperity.
“Africa does not need a better survival strategy. It needs structural solutions that convert its extraordinary assets into durable prosperity on Africa’s own terms,” says founder Eugene N Nforngwa.
“ARI is not a conventional think tank. We sit deliberately at the interface between rigorous research, actionable policy, and on-the-ground practice — because structural transformation requires all three, and the gap between them is where development progress most often stalls.”
The problem ARI addresses is not a lack of potential. It is the persistent gap between potential and structural capability: the ability of countries and institutions to turn resources into value, population growth into productivity, climate risk into adaptive investment, and continental integration into real economic power.
“It all started with one question: “Why, as the world halved extreme poverty, did Africa’s share of the global poor rise from 14% to 67%?”