It also made me think about the potential wealth of Africa. It will be interesting to see how it continues to transform with technology and micro-entrepreneurship.
The continent's security is hampered by its sheer size and the massive borders of many of its countries. What this means it that few countries have the funds for large and capable enough security forces to exercise control over the whole of their territory. So outside the cities, large parts of the countryside exist in a security vacuum where thugs, rebels, criminals and assorted other unsavoury types essentially have free reign.
It also hampers trade and communication. With communities being spread out over such huge distances, transport infrastructure and the associated costs become vital. But few African nations can afford to maintain proper highway networks and even if they could, there's a lack of sufficient transport capability to effectively utilise it. As a result, intra-state trade is severely limited and inter-state trade even more so. This logistics problem also affects the delivery of aid.
To be fair, this isn't true of all African countries. South Africa and Egypt, for example, are notable exceptions for having a security presence throughout the country, a well-developed and advanced transport infrastructure and so on. But bringing countries like the DRC, CAR & Uganda up to the same level is not going to be an easy task.
One hope lies in having less of a top-down socialist central-planning approach and more encouragement of a federal self-organising entrepreneurial environment to encourage communities to grow themselves and gradually build their own transport and communications networks outwards. Technology will make this easier, but I think anybody expecting an economic revolution in Africa anytime soon is holding on to a false hope.
Through the majority of US and Canadian history, the same could be said of both countries. (Canada did send the mounties out in advance of the settlers, but there weren't enough of them.)
Let me suggest that the problem is not the lack of security forces but the need for them, especially since they tend to turn into "thugs, rebels, criminals and assorted other unsavoury types".
For many African countries, such as the DRC, this is not the case. They have inherited borders and population groupings that date from colonial eras and have more to do with arbitrary lines drawn on a map than the actual ability of each country to enforce or protect them. As a result there is seldom a single point of origin from which to begin the creation of a security umbrella and then expand outwards; instead they have to individually try to secure a number of cities and towns situated far apart from each other while trying desperately to get a hand on the largely undeveloped and un-patrolled areas in between. To use the DRC as an example, the national army has virtually no control over the land between Kinshasa, the capital, and cities like Goma and North Kivu. There is no proper level of internal security.
To be fair, your point about the quality (or lack thereof) of African security forces is valid. There's no doubt that if more African armies were well-trained, disciplined and professional they would be able to make far more effective use of the limited resources available to them. Unfortunately, most are as useless and corrupt as the political hierarchies governing their countries. But my point was that even with well-trained forces, the vast distances across which many African countries stretch make an already difficult situation so much harder to deal with on the tiny budgets most African countries have available. And that even those who do attempt to get their act together are dragged down by the fact that trade, the one thing that could lift them out of poverty, is often severely restricted by geography.
You cite length of borders as an issue. Borders grow as the square root of the size of a country, and if we assume that population & resources grow linearly with the area of a country, securing borders is actually easier for big countries.
The cost of having a strong enough security forces and of building adequate transport infrastructure should not depend on the size of the countries, but on the population density -- when expressed as percentage of GDP.
Africa's population density is not exceptional in any way: Africa: 30 person per km^2 (and this includes the Sahara where basically nobody lives -- almost a third of Africa) South America: 21 USA: 31 Mexico: 55
Why would you assume that?
Africa's population density is not exceptional in any way
But Earth's population density is off the chart compared to other planets. Africa is too big to generalize. The USA has both New York City and Wyoming. Population and economic value are intensely concentrated in cities, so being big or small doesn't matter. Having productive cities does.
You don't say...
Not really... before seeing this map, I've long known that the Sahara desert is larger than the continental U.S. Besides the logistics problems mentioned in other comments, this large block of non-producing land, which separates the fertile parts of the continent from Europe and Asia, is a key reason why the continent has historically been disadvantaged. (It's quite possible the creation of the Sahara is what encouraged the first proto-humans into leave the continent to colonize the rest of the world.)
Likewise. I'd always had it pegged as smaller than the USA.
The shocking thing is that I got a high grade for Geography when I was in school (what are we teaching our kids?!)