A Giant Awakens: Inside Africa's Economic Upsurge

“When Kirinya drops into the iHub café to buy a latté, he pays his bill of 100 Kenyan shillings (€0.85 or $1.16) by text message. First he types in the café's telephone number and enters a PIN. Then he hits "send" and the transaction is complete.”

In roughly a decade, Africa has gone from being labeled "the hopeless continent" to enjoying an unprecedented boom. In a three-part series, SPIEGEL Online explores this transformation -- its drivers, winners and losers -- and asks if it can last.

Here are the facts beyond fiction:

1. No other continent has developed as rapidly in the last decade as Africa, where real economic growth was between 5 and 10 percent annually. In oil-rich countries, such as Angola, it was a possibly record-breaking 22.6 percent in 2007.
2. A World Bank study shows that 17 of the 50 national economies currently displaying the greatest economic progress are in Africa.
3. China the world's largest economy has overtaken the West to become Africa's most important trade partner. The volume of Sino-African trade amounted to nearly $200 billion last year.
4. Many countries have become better governed, and Africa as a whole is more peaceful and democratic than it once was.
5. At the same time, a revolution is taking place in the information and communications sector, as Africa connects itself to the world via modern data highways. Nowhere is the spread of the Internet as all-encompassing as it is between Cairo and Cape Town, and nowhere is mobile-phone use increasing as explosively. There are now 650 million African mobile-phone users -- more than in North America.
6. By 2050, at least 2 billion people will live in Africa, accounting for one quarter of the world's labor force.
7. Child mortality, illiteracy rates and AIDS infection rates are declining, and life expectancy has increased by 10 percent.

To access the SPIEGEL Online series, follow this link -- A Giant Awakens: Inside Africa's Economic Upsurge.

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