The World Bank has revised its Sub-Saharan Africa growth forecast downward to 4.0 percent for 2026 before a partial recovery to an average of 4.4 percent in 2027 and 2028, warning that the negative economic fallout from the Middle East conflict would outweigh structural reform gains across most of the continent while simultaneously creating a revenue windfall for oil exporters including Nigeria and Angola through elevated energy prices.
The projections, contained in the June edition of the bank’s Global Economic Prospects report, showed that real per capita GDP growth across the region would hold at 1.6 percent in 2026 before firming to an average of 2.0 percent annually in 2027 and 2028, a rate the bank said remained insufficient to deliver meaningful reductions in extreme poverty across a region where the scale of human need continued to outpace economic output.
The bank said oil exporters like Nigeria and Angola would benefit from higher energy prices generated by conflict-related supply disruptions, while non-oil-exporting economies would face the opposite effect, absorbing higher fuel, fertilizer, and transport costs that would push up inflation, particularly food prices, and suppress both consumption and investment. The bank said limited fiscal resources were constraining the ability of many governments to shield their populations from those pressures.
Among country-specific assessments, the report said structural constraints in Nigeria and South Africa had contributed to downward revisions in their growth forecasts despite the positive macroeconomic effects of higher oil prices. It acknowledged that reforms in Ethiopia and Nigeria, including exchange-rate liberalization and improvements in public financial management, would provide partial offsets to global headwinds, and that South Africa’s improved energy availability was a meaningful positive development. It also flagged growth downgrades for Uganda due to oil project delays, for Senegal following revelations of hidden debt and an IMF funding freeze, and for Côte d’Ivoire on account of falling cocoa prices.
The bank warned that rising government debt across emerging markets and developing economies was translating into higher interest rates, heavier debt service burdens, and growing risk of debt distress, and that the decline in Official Development Assistance was likely to deepen humanitarian and health crises including the recent Ebola outbreak. Food insecurity in fragile and conflict-affected economies was projected to remain at the highest levels since the early 2000s, with conditions expected to deteriorate even in more stable economies.
