Financing development in Africa : trends, issues and challenges

Abstract

The reduction and eventual eradication of poverty, hunger, and starvation in Africa is one of the main challenges facing African leaders and the international community. According to the March 2005 report of the Commission for Africa, “African poverty and stagnation is the greatest tragedy of our time.” Understanding the nature of this tragedy requires and examination of poverty statistics for the developing world in the last three decades. In 1970 there were 1.2 billion poor people in the developing world. Of this number there were 104 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 830 million in East Asia, 208 million in South Asia, 36 million in Latin America, and 27 million in the Middle East and North Africa (Cooper 2005). Between 1970 and 2000, there was a tremendous reduction in the number of poor people in the developing world. More specifically, the number fell from 1.2 billion in 1970 to 647 million in 2000. However, most of the reduction came from East Asia where the number of poor people fell from 830 million in 1970 to 114 million in 2000. Sub-Saharan Africa happens to be the only sub-region where there was a tremendous increase in the number of poor people during the period. With a head-count ratio of 54.8 percent in 2000, it also has the highest proportion of domestic population that is poor.