M.S Benedicta Lasi | Executive Chair, Africa Governance Centre
ARUSHA, Tanzania — Africa’s rapid population growth is making conventional approaches to lawmaking increasingly inadequate, the Executive Chair of the Africa Governance Centre, Benedicta Lasi, has warned. Opening the Strategic Legislative Governance Forum, she argued that the continent’s legislatures must prepare for the demands of a much larger, younger and increasingly interconnected population.
The Forum also established the Strategic Legislative Governance Platform, launched by Pan-African Parliament President Dr Fateh Boutbig to sustain legislative research, comparative learning and cooperation on economic transformation.
Lasi contrasted Africa’s population of roughly 227 million in 1950 with an estimated 1.5 billion today and projections of about 2.5 billion by 2050. Those figures, she said, carried profound implications for employment, education, housing, infrastructure and the capacity of public institutions. The question for parliamentarians was whether laws being passed today would still be fit for purpose as the scale of those pressures increased.
The Africa Governance Centre convened the Forum in partnership with East Africa Legislative Assembly (EALA) and Conference of Speakers and Presidents of African Legislatures (CoSPAL) at the EALA Chambers in Arusha to consider the legislative foundations of Africa’s economic transformation. The discussions connected long-term national planning with parliament’s responsibilities for budgets, investment, regional integration and accountability. The Strategic Legislative Governance Platform, launched during the meeting, is intended to support continuing research and exchanges among African legislatures.
She linked the demographic challenge to the structure of African economies, noting the high proportion of work taking place informally. Legislatures needed to think more seriously about the conditions under which enterprises could expand, young people could find productive work and public services could meet growing demand.
Lasi also rejected the suggestion that Africans were indifferent to democratic accountability. Referring to survey findings from across the continent, she said citizens continued to support democratic choice and reject authoritarian forms of government. The challenge, in her account, was to make democratic institutions more capable of delivering the practical benefits citizens expected.
She pointed to improvements in East African border procedures as an example of what coordinated policy could achieve. The gains made at the Holili–Taveta crossing and along regional freight corridors demonstrated that administrative and legislative reform could translate directly into lower costs and faster trade.
The demographic comparison gave the opening address its urgency. A continent whose population has multiplied several times within a human lifetime must build public systems at a scale that earlier generations did not confront. The pressures are cumulative: new schools need teachers, new urban neighbourhoods need water and transport, and millions of entrants to the labour market need enterprises capable of employing them productively.
Lasi’s argument placed parliaments at the centre of those choices. Laws on land use, business registration, municipal finance, vocational education and cross-border commerce can either make economic adaptation easier or preserve costly obstacles. She urged legislators to examine whether existing regulatory systems were designed for the Africa now emerging rather than the economies and population patterns of previous decades.
Her discussion of informal work was especially important. The prevalence of informal employment cannot be addressed simply by requiring businesses to register. Firms need access to reliable power, finance, markets and predictable rules before formalisation becomes commercially realistic. Legislative scrutiny of these conditions offers a more useful measure of economic reform than counting the number of new business laws passed.
The border examples supplied a practical counterpoint to the scale of the challenge. Changes to administrative procedures can save traders time without waiting for a generation of new infrastructure to be completed. Such gains depend on cooperation among customs authorities, transport agencies and neighbouring governments, and they can be lost when implementation is inconsistent.
Her treatment of democratic opinion was equally pointed. Support for elections and rejection of authoritarian rule do not remove public frustration with ineffective government. Instead, they heighten the responsibility of representative institutions to demonstrate that political participation can influence decisions about jobs, services and opportunity. The test for legislatures, she argued, lies in their ability to connect accountability with delivery.
The Forum, convened with the East African Legislative Assembly and the Conference of Speakers and Presidents of African Legislatures, was intended to shift attention towards the long-term consequences of parliamentary decisions. Lasi urged legislators to approach their responsibilities with the needs of future generations firmly in view.
