Understanding and Reducing Persistent Poverty in Africa

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Higher education is almost unheard of, although certain universities in Egypt and South Africa have excellent reputations. However, some African nations have a paucity of persons with university degrees, and advanced degrees are rare in most areas. As such, the continent, for the most part, lacks scientists, engineers and even teachers.

The seeming parody of aid workers attempting to teach trilingual people English is not entirely untrue. South Africa under apartheid is an excellent example of how an adverse situation can further degrade. The largely black population earlier wished to learn English black South Africans saw it as a way to unite themselves as they speak several different native languages.

The greatest mortality in Africa arises from preventable water-borne diseases, which affect infants and young children greater than any other group.

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The principal cause of these diseases is the regional water crisis , or lack of safe drinking water primarily stemming from mixing sewage and drinking water supplies. Less than one percent are actually treated. In fact, the situation with AIDS is improving in some nations as infection rates drop, and deaths from Ebola are rare.

On the other hand, diseases once common but now almost unknown in most of the industrialized world, like malaria , tuberculosis , tapeworm and dysentery often claim far more victims, particularly among the young. Polio has made a comeback recently due to misinformation spread by anti-American Islamic groups in Nigeria. Diseases native to Africa, such as sleeping sickness , also resist attempts at elimination too. Clean potable water is rare in most of Africa even those parts outside the sub-Saharan region despite the fact that the continent is crossed by several major rivers and contains some of the largest freshwater lakes in the world.

However, many of the major population centres are coastal , and few major cities have adequate sewage treatment systems. Although boiling water is a possibility, fuel for boiling is scarce as well.

Understanding and Reducing Persistent Poverty in Africa

The problem is worst in Africa's rapidly growing cities, such as Cairo , Lagos and Kinshasa. Colonialism concentrated on joining the coast with internal territories. 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. Even basic services like telecommunications are often treated the same way.

While Poverty in Africa Has Declined, Number of Poor Has Increased

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.

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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. 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. 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. Quality of life does not correlate exactly with a nation's wealth.

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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. Thank you for participating in this survey! Your feedback is very helpful to us as we work to improve the site functionality on worldbank.

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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.

The picture on African inequality is complex. An eBook version of this title already exists in your shopping cart.

If you would like to replace it with a different purchasing option please remove the current eBook option from your cart. Edited by Christopher B. Barrett , Peter D. Add to Wish List. Description Contents Editors Subjects. Description Prior work has shown that there is a significant amount of turnover amongst the African poor as households exit and enter poverty.

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