Understanding and Reducing Persistent Poverty in Africa

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Understanding and Reducing Persistent Poverty in Africa - TofC

Your feedback is very helpful to us as we work to improve the site functionality on worldbank. Working for a World Free of Poverty. Where We Work Africa. Tweet Share Share LinkedIn. Improving the coverage, comparability and quality of poverty and inequality data in Africa will be equally important. Other key findings of the report are: Nonmonetary dimensions of poverty have been improving, but the challenges remain enormous.

Compared with , adult literacy rates are up by four percentage points and the gender gap is shrinking.

At the same time, despite substantial improvement in school enrollment, the quality of schooling is often low and more than two in five adults are still illiterate. Paradoxically, citizens in resource-rich countries have worse outcomes in human welfare indicators, conditional on income. This findings underscores that while economic growth is critical for poverty reduction, it is not sufficient. As such, nearly none of Africa's roads and railways connect with each other in any meaningful way. Joining Africa's extensive railway network has recently become a priority for African nations outside of southwest Africa, which has an integrated network.

Transportation between neighbouring coastal settlements is nearly always by sea, no matter the topography of the land in between them.

Poverty in Africa

Even basic services like telecommunications are often treated the same way. Although Africa had numerous pre-European overland trade routes, few are suitable for modern transport such as trucks or railways, especially when they cross old European colonial borders. Despite other hot spots for war, Africa consistently remains among the top places for ongoing conflicts, consisting of both long standing civil wars e. Somalia and conflicts between countries. Despite a lack of basic social services or even the basic necessities of life, military forces are often well-financed and well-equipped.

As a result, Africa is full of refugees , who are often deliberately displaced by military forces during a conflict, rather than just having fled from war torn areas. Although many refugees emigrate to open countries such as Germany , Canada , and the United States , the ones who do emigrate are often the most educated and skilled.

The remainder often become a burden on neighbouring African nations that, while peaceful, are generally unable to deal with the logistical problems refugees pose. Civil war usually has the result of totally shutting down all government services. However, any conflict generally disrupts what trade or economy there is. Sierra Leone , which depends on diamonds for much of its economic activity, not only faces disruption in production which reduces the supply , but a thriving black market in conflict diamonds , which drives down the price for what diamonds are produced.

The link between climate change and poverty has been examined.

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However, there is nothing natural about the transformation of natural hazards into disasters. The severity of a disaster's impact is dependent on existing levels of vulnerability, extent of exposure to disaster event and nature of hazard. It is heavily influenced by the interplay between economic, socio-cultural and demographic factors, as well as skewed development, such as rapid and unplanned urbanisation.

The level of poverty is a key determinant of disaster risk. Poverty increases propensity and severity of disasters and reduces peoples' capacity to recover and reconstruct.

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Africa's economic malaise is self-perpetuating, as it engenders more of the disease, warfare, misgovernment, and corruption that created it in the first place. Other effects of poverty have similar consequences. The most direct consequence of low GDP is Africa's low standard of living and quality of life. Except for a wealthy elite and the more prosperous peoples of South Africa and the Maghreb, Africans have very few consumer goods.

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Quality of life does not correlate exactly with a nation's wealth. Angola , for instance, reaps large sums annually from its diamond mines, but after years of civil war, conditions there remain poor.

Radios , televisions, and automobiles are rare luxuries. Infant mortality is high, while life expectancy , literacy , and education are all low. The UN also lowers the ranking of African states because the continent sees greater inequality than any other region.

Understanding and Reducing Persistent Poverty in Africa

The best educated often choose to leave the continent for the West or the Persian Gulf to seek a better life; in the case of some nations like South Africa , many Caucasians have fled due to employment bias. Catastrophes cause deadly periods of great shortages. The most damaging are the famines that have regularly hit the continent, especially the Horn of Africa. These have been caused by disruptions due to warfare, years of drought , and plagues of locusts. At the high end, Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo both saw triple-digit inflation throughout the period.

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Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Prior work has shown that there is a significant amount of turnover amongst the African poor as households exit and enter poverty. Some of this mobility can be attributed to regular movement back and forth in response to exogenous variability in climate, prices, health, etc.

Other crossings of the poverty line reflect permanent shifts in long-term well-being associated with gains or losses of productive assets or permanent changes in asset productivity due, for example, to adoption of improved technologies or access to new, higher-value markets.

Distinguishing true structural mobility from simple churning is important because it clarifies the factors that facilitate such important structural change.

Conversely, it also helps identify the constraints that may leave other households caught in a trap of persistent, structural poverty. The papers in this book help to distinguish the types of poverty and to deepen understanding of the structural features and constraints that create poverty traps. Such an understanding allows communities, local governments and donors to take proactive, effective steps to combat persistent poverty in Africa.