Poor growth by African governments during the past 40 years resulted in the worst aggregated economic disaster of the 20th century, according to a new study by the World Economic Forum (WEF). More Africans are trapped in poverty today than when the continent first began shedding the yoke of colonialism in the late 1950s. "The economic growth performance of the African continent has been tragically disappointing," write economists Elsa Artadi and Xavier Sala-i-Martin in the opening chapter of The African Competitiveness Report 2004, released at the WEF Africa summit in Maputo, Mozambique, in early June. "We use the word "tragic" because it has had enormous consequences for human welfare: hundreds of millions of citizens have become poor as a direct consequence of this dismal economic performance."