When I saw a new NBER working paper titled "Disease control, demographic change and institutional development in Africa" (PDF) pop up in the NBER RSS feed I thought the title sounded interesting, so I downloaded the paper to peruse later. Then today the new-ish (and great!) blog Cherokee Gothic highlighted the same paper in a post, and I finally took a look. Unfortunately the paper title is rather uninformative, as the authors only used data from Burkina Faso. Sure, economics papers tend to have bigger, less formal titles than papers in some other fields, but I think this is particularly unhelpful. There are enough search frictions in finding applicable literature on any given topic that it helps to be somewhat more precise.
For reference, here's Burkina Faso:
And here's Africa:
Not the same.
It's unclear from the data and arguments presented how these results -- for a regional disease control program, but only using data from Burkina Faso -- might generalize to the quite diverse disease environments, demographic trends, and institutional histories of various African countries. The paper doesn't answer or even give much grounds for speculation on whether onchocerciasis or other disease control programs would yield similar results in countries as diverse as (for example) Senegal, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Angola.
A quick thought experiment: Virginia's population is about 1.5% of the total population of North America, just as Burkina Faso's population is about 1.5% of the total population on Africa. Can you imagine someone writing a paper on health and institutions using data from Virginia and titling that paper "Health and institutions in North America"? Or writing a paper on Vietnamese history and titling it "A history of Asia"? Probably not.