This thesis address the very relevent issue of the impact of Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) on the economic growth and well-being of developing countries. To this end, the thesis focuses on Africa, the fastest growing continent where FDIs have recently become sizeable. After reviewing the literature on FDI taxonomies, economic motivations, and impact on recipient countries, the thesis analyse the impact of FDIs on the Human Development Index, develop by the United Nations to capture not only the economics performance but also the level of education and life expectancy in the country. By using a panel dataset covering more than 30 years (1992-2023) and almost 50 countries, and applying both standard panel data techniques and GMM estinators to take into account endogeneity issues, we uncover that FDIs have a positive, but weakly statistically significant, impact on all the three dimensions of the HDI index..