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The Central African Republic (CAR) is considered among the world’s poorest countries and is possibly the poorest. Despite substantial financial assistance since a civil war erupted 10 years ago, no significant recovery can be recorded. Scholars commonly explain CAR’s entrenched poverty with its status as an aid orphan, landlocked geography, unfavourable demographic profile and recurrent political crises. We provide an alternative argument after investigating peace and security, the private sector and public goods provision through combined bottom-up and top-down analysis of fieldwork, budgetary and development data. We find that rampant and continued poverty stems from a pronounced disconnect between the globally commodified market towards a locally subsistent communal economy. Politicians and foreign actors have broken their promises to the populace and continue to block the exchange of ideas and resources. The best intentions of international development actors to reform the state from the top down fail just as much as bottom-up attempts to strengthen local resilience. Rather, CAR’s trajectory to prosperity depends on reconnecting the centre and peripheries, elites and general population, and the local with the global. This will require resistance against structures and agents that are (at times unknowingly) perpetuating the disconnect.
Glawion et al. (Thu,) studied this question.