The New Partnership for Africa's Development: Differential Effect on the Development of Sub-Saharan Africa

African leaders have undertaken several initiatives to put the African continent back on the path of sustainable development. Among these initiatives, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) was established as a catalyst for alleviating the challenges of African development. This paper aims to evaluate the differential effect of NEPAD on the four objectives of NEPAD to establish if NEPAD has had significant differential effects within the years of NEPAD compared to the years before NEPAD. This will help to understand the priorities of NEPAD policy better. The paper relies on and expands existing research on NEPAD and African development. The research applies a mix of review and quantitative approaches. Proxy data on four of NEPAD's target variables of development were collected from the World Bank Economic Indicators. The data were analyzed using the paired sample t-test for means at an alpha level 0.05. The results of the study show mixed effects of NEPAD. On the one hand, two variables, namely GDP and women in tertiary education in sub-Saharan Africa over some twenty-one years of NEPAD, significantly surpasses the GDP and women in tertiary education in sub-Saharan Africa for twenty-one years before the inception of NEPAD at a p-value of less than 0.0001. On the other hand, another variable, namely merchandising export to higher-income countries from sub-Saharan Africa during the years of NEPAD, is significantly lower than merchandising export before the inception of NEPAD at a p-value of less than 0.0001. In addition, CO2 emissions are found to be significantly lower in the years before the inception of NEPAD than during the period of NEPAD at a p-value of less than 0.0001. These results provide insight for improved public administration policies to bolster merchandising exports. Therefore, this paper is an academic case study on sub-Saharan Africa's economic growth that offers a new agenda for future researchers.