Some parts of Africa had close trade relationships with Arab kingdoms, and by the time of the Ottoman Empire, Africans had begun converting to Islam in large numbers.

This development, along with the economic potential in finding a trade route to the Indian Ocean, brought the Portuguese to sub-Saharan Africa as an imperial force.

Oil-rich countries such as Algeria, Libya and Gabon, and mineral-rich Botswana have emerged among the top economies since the 21st century, while Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo are potentially among the world's richest nations by natural resources, but have sunk into the list of the world's poorest nations due to pervasive political corruption, warfare, and emigration.

[47][51][52] As African nations struggled to address the health and economic repercussions of the pandemic, the average fiscal deficit throughout Africa increased from 5% of GDP in 2019 to over 8% in 2020.

Due to a lack of fiscal headroom, the deficit resulted in increasing borrowing, which African countries have less capacity to absorb than other developed economies.

[59] In a recent report, female-led businesses were found more likely to invest in innovation, export goods and services, and provide employee training.

The Group of Five (Indonesia, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates) are another increasingly important market for Africa's exports.

[74] Africa's economy—with expanding trade, English language skills (official in many Sub-Saharan countries), improving literacy and education, availability of splendid resources and cheaper labour force—is expected to continue to perform better into the future.

The economic historian David Kenneth Fieldhouse has taken a kind of middle position, arguing that the effects of colonialism were actually limited and their main weakness wasn't in deliberate underdevelopment but in what it failed to do.

Jared Diamond argues in Guns, Germs, and Steel that Africa has always been poor due to a number of ecological factors affecting historical development.

These factors include low population density, the tsetse fly, malaria, lack of navigable rivers, and the north–south orientation of Africa's geography.

Acemoglue and Robinson, for example, argue that most of Africa has always been relatively poor, but "Aksum, Ghana, Songhay, Mali, [and] Great Zimbabwe ... were probably as developed as their contemporaries anywhere in the world.

"[100] A number of people including Rodney and Joseph E. Inikori have argued that the poverty of Africa at the onset of the colonial period was principally due to the demographic loss associated with the slave trade as well as other related societal shifts.

[103] This includes 12 countries for which Greenberg's diversity index exceeds 0.9, meaning that a pair of randomly selected people will have less than 10% chance of having the same mother tongue.

Corruption in Africa consists primarily of extracting economic rent and moving the resulting financial capital overseas instead of investing at home; the stereotype of African dictators with Swiss bank accounts is often accurate.

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers estimate that from 1970 to 1996, capital flight from 30 sub-Saharan countries totalled $187bn, exceeding those nations' external debts.

[124] Despite this, trade between countries belonging to the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), a particularly strong economic region, grew six-fold over the past decade up to 2012.

Trade in services, mainly travel and tourism, continued to rise in year 2012, underscoring the continent's strong potential in this sphere.

[139] The situation whereby African nations export crops to the West while millions on the continent starve has been blamed on the economic policies of the developed countries.

[144] The result of this is that the global price of such products is continually reduced until Africans are unable to compete, except for cash crops that do not grow easily in a northern climate.

Influential political include pre-colonial centralization, ethnic fractionalization, European settlement, natural resource dependence, and democracy.

[137][138] For many African countries, mineral exploration and production constitute significant parts of their economies and remain keys to future economic growth.

African mineral reserves rank first or second for bauxite, cobalt, diamonds, phosphate rocks, platinum-group metals (PGM), vermiculite, and zirconium.

The 2005 share of world production from African soil is the following: bauxite 9%; aluminium 5%; chromite 44%; cobalt 57%; copper 5%; gold 21%; iron ore 4%; steel 2%; lead (Pb) 3%; manganese 39%; zinc 2%; cement 4%; natural diamond 46%; graphite 2%; phosphate rock 31%; coal 5%; mineral fuels (including coal) & petroleum 13%; uranium 16%.

[citation needed] Since Africa is home to large reserves of the minerals needed for the ongoing energy transition, i.e. the transition to renewable energy technologies, the predicted increase in global demand for these critical minerals could become a driver of sustainable economic development on the continent, not least for the mineral-rich countries of Africa.

[162] The African Union has outlined a policy framework, the Africa Mining Vision, to leverage the continent’s mineral reserves in pursuit of sustainable development and socio-economic transformation.

Reciprocal investment between Africa and China increased dramatically in recent years[194][195] amidst the current world financial crisis.

[198] Remittances from the African diaspora and rising interest in investment from the West will be especially helpful for Africa's least developed and most devastated economies, such as Burundi, Togo and Comoros.

[204] South Africa has attracted increasing attention from the United States as a new frontier of investment in manufacture, financial markets and small business,[205] as has Liberia in recent years under their new leadership.

The idea of a single currency union across Africa has been floated, and plans exist to have it established by 2020, though many issues, such as bringing continental inflation rates below 5 percent, remain hurdles in its finalization.