In the late summer of 1981, in a hot and sticky Washington DC, staff members of the World Bank were strategizing how best to release a report entitled Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Some were nervous about how the report might be received – and rightly so. The content of those 200-odd pages proved highly controversial. They would also be enormously consequential, reshaping the role of the state in economies across the developing world for decades to come. In sub-Saharan Africa, the impact of the report would be directly felt through policies of structural adjustment that linked access to development finance to a neo-liberal set of economic policies. Africa's growth prospects, the report argued, had been curtailed by the overreach of the state; what was needed instead was a greater role for unfettered market forces and for the private sector. The report represented nothing less than an agenda to revolutionize the respective roles of the public and private sectors in African economies. The attempt to implement that agenda, however, produced uneven results.