African economies have recorded significant growth in output; however, growth has not been enough to lift its teeming population out of poverty, stem growing unemployment and bridge the significant income divide within cities and between rural and urban areas. Jobless growth has resulted in poor standard of living even in the face of relatively impressive GDP growth. To understand the dynamics of recent development in Africa, this book draws on Arthur Lewis's (1954) “dual” thesis as well as recent scholarship on structural change (SC) (McMillan and Rodrik , 2011), which posits that where modern and traditional sectors coexist as in the case of African countries, there is the potential for capital and labor to move from low- productivity to highproductivity sectors through the process of SC that fuels economic growth and raises productivity. The rise in productivity and growth through these movements results in resource allocation efficiency gains, even when withinsector productivity is not changing significantly.

Central to discussions on the nature of structural transformation (ST) of economies is the rapid rate of urbanization fueled by a combination of natural birth within cities and migration of rural dwellers to urban centers. Conventional wisdom suggests that industrialization and urbanization proceed in tandem; however, when this takes place in the absence of industrialization and manufacturing production, large swathes of cities are turned into slums while informal economies with little prospects for productivity growth proliferate. Additionally, African economies have been characterized by jobless growth. Urbanization has produced a mixture of wealth conjoining with a conundrum of sprawls, slums and sickness. Africa's current population stands at close to 1.2 billion, and will reach about 1.689 billion (16 percent of world total) by 2030 if we assume a growth rate ranging between 2.0 percent and 2.5 percent. The driver of the rapid changes is high fertility in countries, such as Nigeria, the United Republic of Tanzania, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia and Uganda, whose contribution to total growth is quite significant. In addition is the rapid decline in urban mortality rates and increased life expectancy that complement equally rural– urban migration, thereby fueling urban growth.