Africa's middle classes: between relative prosperity and persistent precarity

Africa’s middle classes have attracted growing attention and ignited vigorous debate in development research and policy. Interest in Africa’s middle classes accelerated in the wake of influential publications from the African Development Bank demonstrating that Africa’s middle classes have grown both in size and purchasing power. This chapter takes point of departure in the influential quantitative measurements of Africa’s middle classes produced by development economists and the conceptual and methodological critiques raised against these from competing measurements and emerging qualitative perspectives on middle class experiences in Africa. The chapter recognizes that real progress has been achieved in poverty reduction and per capita income growth in many African countries in recent decades, while also seeking to nuance the celebratory and optimistic interpretations of the implications for for economic and social development. Enduring anxieties, persistent precarity and straining social obligations towards less fortunate kin are emphasized as an ingrained part of middle classes experiences in contemporary Africa. Caution is further needed in the current economic climate marked by multiple shocks and imminent threat of worldwide economic stagnation, which could stall—or even reverse—the past decades’ positive trends in poverty reduction.