Nigeria and other Sub-Saharan African economies trail the rest of the developing world most significantly in governance quality, business regulation, and market openness, the International Monetary Fund has warned in a new assessment that describes the continent as overdue for a fundamental reset of its growth model.

The fund said that at current growth rates, it would take roughly half a century for per capita income in the region to double, a trajectory it described as unacceptable given the scale of development needs across African economies. It said implementing well-designed structural reforms, particularly in governance, business regulation, and market openness, could lift output by around 20 percent within a decade.

The IMF pointed to Rwanda and Benin Republic as examples of countries that had successfully cut bureaucratic red tape and deployed digital tools to make the business environment more accessible and competitive, contrasting them with the broader regional pattern of stagnation.

On state-owned enterprises, the fund said reforming energy and transport companies was among the most pressing priorities across the region. It argued that keeping tariffs below cost-recovery levels set off a chain of deterioration: weakened cash flow led to delayed maintenance, which led to stalled investment, which produced the familiar outcome of unreliable and expensive services that acted as a drag on firms and households alike. Better reform efforts, it said, mapped affected stakeholders clearly, aligned prices with actual costs, defined social objectives explicitly, and communicated how any resulting savings would be deployed.

The fund said the era of state-led growth was effectively over across the region. With debt elevated, borrowing expensive, and development aid declining, governments could no longer function as the primary engine of economic expansion. What the region needed, it said, was a decisive shift toward private investment backed by broad, business-friendly structural reforms. It noted that despite strong growth in a handful of countries including Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda, the region as a whole had averaged real GDP per capita growth of only 1.4 percent per year over the past three years, compared with 3.4 percent across emerging markets and developing economies globally.

The IMF cautioned that choosing and designing reforms was only half the challenge. Implementation, it said, was almost always harder, because the benefits of structural change often arrived slowly, sometimes beyond a single electoral cycle, while entrenched interests actively resisted transformation. It said political feasibility had to be treated as seriously as technical design for any reform program to succeed.