We investigate the link between fragility and economic development in sub-Saharan Africa over a yearly panel covering the 1999-2004 period. Beside the conventional definition of fragility adopted by the OECD Development Assistance Committee, we introduce the more severe definition of extreme fragility. We show that only the latter exerts a significantly negative impact on economic development, once standard economic, demographic, and institutional regressors are accounted for. As a by-product of this investigation we also produce evidence on the growth performance of the area. We find a tendency to convergence and no influence of geographic and historical factors.