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The biggest problem is the vicious cycle. We have a population without skills. While we retrain, we must import skills from advanced countries. For that you need dollars. But to have dollars you have to produce exports. To produce exports you need people with skills. - Yoweri Museveni

Introduction
The economic development of Africa has been helped as well as hindered by a vast range of both internal and external factors. One of the most interesting phenomena that has impacted the continents economic development is that of what I call out-of-African’s; the continents external constituents who have immigrated to the developed world. The relationships between these external constituents and their home countries has created an informal or secondary structure of international capital flows; the doppleganger of the formal state structure and its relationship with international donors and investors.

The standard economic development paradigm in third world, or developing, countries -- and in Africa in particular -- involves the active participation of international donor agencies who finance infrastructure through a formal relationship with governments. Such donor agencies range from International Finance Institutions (IFIs) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, to the governments of countries in the developed world. In theory, the incentive for these donors to assist in the development of African countries is derived from the notion that more developed economies will have better terms of trade and help the global economy to expand.

Unfortunately this type of donor funding is bottlenecked by a clientalist social structure that operates in Africa. This structure is one in which patron-client relationships overwrite the system of meritocracy which operates in the developed world. Although there are several factors that inhibit the performance of the formal state relationship with international donor agencies, the nepotism involved in clientalist social structures, in many ways, hinder economic development.

On an ideological level, clientalist structures are admirable, they are the embodiment of the social responsibility of the privileged to their kith and kin. Despite some of the positive social effects of this, its operation within the formal structure has negative consequences on development because it is an exclusive system. When in operation this system frustrates certain populations, specifically, those without the connections to enter into the formal state structure, and those whose skills do not receive the same return under this structure as they would in a meritocratic system. Thus, these populations migrate into societies where their skills will be better acknowledged and appreciated.

Migrant populations do not, however, sever ties with their countries of origin. Parallel to the paradigm of inefficient state structures funded by international donor agencies, is the Doppelganger State: which effectively ensures that funds are channeled to the places where they are most needed, and the ‘people’ benefit from these informal flows of global capital. The doppelganger state structure has emerged to offset the negative impact of clientalist practices in the formal state structure, although it is itself also based on patron-client relationships between globally based and locally based citizens.

There are two strong categories of out-of-Africans, migrant traders, and members of the ‘Brain drain’. These two categories have emerged for different reasons, and have impacted Africa’s economic development in different ways. In this paper I will draw on theoretical analysis, the ethnographic research of myself and others, as well as some statistical analysis, in order to understand the causes and effects of emigration in the context of Africa’s political economy.

In order to fully understand the functions of these external constituents in the development of Africa one must first understand the historical factors that have facilitated their emergence.

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