How comprehensive is comprehensive? Using Wangari Maathai as a critique of the World Bank’s contemporary development model

This paper asks how comprehensive and holistic is the World Bank’s current development model, also known as the Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF), in Africa? By comprehensive and holistic, I am referring to whether the framework has the ability to capture the sources of all impediments to progress in different African contexts and offer corresponding solutions. I argue that the CDF is myopic and hackneyed. Not only does the World Bank employ the same neoliberal logic that informed structural adjustments, but it also continues to miss crucial non-material facets of development in the African countries it purports to serve. I make this argument by comparing the CDF/Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP) model in Kenya to the under-utilised development philosophy of Wangari Maathai. This comparison intimates that an alternative to the CDF is not only possible, but also necessary. Maathai demonstrates how any holistic development approach for postcolonial Africa must grapple with both international and domestic factors that historically and currently exacerbate the chrysalis of political, economic, and social progress. A comprehensive approach must also deal with the particulars of each context while not eliding the uniform histories of exploitation and purposive underdevelopment that many African countries share.