Sub-Saharan Africa has made little progress in reducing extreme poverty, according to the latest Millennium Development Report. This column presents evidence from 1970 to 2006 to the contrary.
The picture of Africa as a place of collapse, hunger, disease and death is slowly fading. Both official statistics and the popular press acknowledge a nascent “African Renaissance”, as the continent is enjoying its longest and strongest growth spurt since independence.Nevertheless, it is still widely believed that this growth is primarily driven by oil and natural resource prices, and that it is confined to well-connected elites in geographically advantaged countries. The popular image is that the poor majority in all African nations and many African nations as a whole are stuck in “poverty traps” created by unfortunate geography and calamitous history. For example, the prospects of meeting first Millennium Development Goal of “halving, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people earning an income less than $1 a day” seem to appear bleak for Africa; the UN writes in its latest Millennium Development Report that “little progress was made in reducing extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa” (UNDP 2008).
We disagree. The sustained African growth of the last 15 years has engendered a steady decline in poverty that puts Africa on track to meet the Goals by 2017. If peace is established in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it returns to the African trend (which is what happened to other African nations that were formerly at war), Africa will halve its $1/day income poverty rate by 2013, two years ahead of the 2015 target.
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Photo source: http://africanstudies.georgetown.edu/67976.html
