Washington, DC — Nearly half the people living in Sub-Saharan Africa are living in conditions of extreme poverty, the World Bank reported today in its annual survey of world development.
Worse, the report suggests that even under the most optimistic economic scenarios, the ranks of Africa's extremely poor - those living on the equivalent of $1 a day or less - will increase by at least 59 million in the next fifteen years.
The World Development Report 2001, a comprehensive survey of global development statistics that documents everything from infant mortality and illiteracy to telephones per capita and access to the Internet, presents a sobering picture of Africa as a continent with the lowest life expectancy rates and the highest infant mortality rates in the world.
"In Africa, we all know the challenges are immense," said Nicholas Stern, the World Bank chief economist who presented the report today at a press conference here in Washington. "It is going to be tough to make significant inroads in poverty in terms of the fraction living under $1 a day."
The key to reversing this trend, he said, is for countries to create the right environment for investment and economic growth, to increase participation in development and for the international community to reverse the decline in international development assistance.
But Stern also sees some signs of hope in Africa. "Of the fifteen fastest growing countries in the world, five of those are in Africa," he said. Stern noted that in 1998-1999, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Uganda all had GDP growth rates higher than 7 per cent and that preliminary figures for 2000 show Sudan, Mauritius, and Uganda with growth rates higher than 5 per cent. Primary school enrollment rates are slowly increasing and fertility rates are declining.
Nonetheless, the nearly 400-page World Development Report suggests that Africa is falling farther behind the rest of the world in many indicators of development. For instance, although high rates of growth in many countries helped reduce the global number of people living on $1 a day or less by eight percent between 1990 and 1998, the trend in Sub-Saharan Africa is still in the other direction: the number of people living on $1 a day or less increased by 25 percent between 1990 and 1998 to a total of 302 million.
Infant mortality rates in Africa have fallen from 101 deaths per thousand live births in 1990 to 92 per thousands in 1999, but are still well above the world average of 54 deaths per thousand births, reports the Bank. In a similar manner, the prediction that a person born in 1998 in Africa will live, on average, for fifty years, places life expectancy in Africa at well below the rates on any other continent. The country with the lowest life expectancy in Africa is Sierra Leone, where a person born in 1999 can expect to live for only 37 years.
The World Development Indicators report estimates that the population in Sub-Saharan Africa today is 643 million people and, although the population growth rate is slowing, the World Bank still projects that the number of people in the region will rise to about 878 million by the year 2015. The largest country in the region is Nigeria with an estimated population of 124 million in 1999, followed by Ethiopia (63 million), Democratic Republic of Congo (50 million) and South Africa (42 million).
The poorest countries in Africa, as measured by annual gross national income per capita, are Ethiopia ($100), Burundi ($120), Sierra Leone ($130), Guinea Bissau ($160) and Malawi ($180). The richest countries in Africa, as measured by annual gross national income per capita, are Botswana ($3,240) and South Africa ($3,160), Tunisia ($2,090), Algeria ($1,550) and Morocco ($1,190). Excluding Libya, which the bank did not have data for, Africa as a whole registers an annual gross national income per capita below $750 per year.
The total economic output of sub-Saharan Africa was estimated at about $316 billion in 1999, or on a per capita basis about $490 per year for every man, woman and child in the region. The total external debt for sub-Saharan Africa is estimated at $216 billion in 1999. Several World Bank officials today praise the recent initiatives at debt relief, but they also warned of the declining amounts of development assistance provided to Sub-Saharan Africa.
"I do think that an enormous effort will have to be made in Africa and part of that story should involve very substantial increases in aid. Africa will not get near those goals unless there is a major international effort," said Stern today.
The World Development Indicators reports that net official development assistance or aid flows to Africa have fallen from $19 billion in 1994 to $12.5 billion in 1999. He noted that the region receives less than 5 per cent of all private capital flows, and most of that money goes to South Africa and Angola.
In releasing this document today, Stern said that World Bank officials were particularly concerned that the data indicates many countries will fall far short of the international goals established by the United Nations last year of cutting the number of people living in poverty by half and enrolling all children in primary school by 2015. For instance, in 1998, only 60 percent of primary school age children were in school in sub-Saharan Africa. Forty percent of the adult population was reported to be illiterate in 1999.
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For the first time, this year, the World Development Indicators has also included a section on communications and the 'digital divide'. The bank notes, , that there are just 14 telephones for every 1,000 people in Africa, as compared to 123 in Latin America and 200 in Europe and Central Asia.
Yet despite reporting that there are 40 times as many computers per capita in developed countries as in Southern Africa, the Bank notes that there has been progress in the region. "In 1995 only five countries in Sub Saharan Africa had Internet connections. Today all countries in the region are connected and Africa's rate of growth of Internet hosts is almost twice the world's average,", reports the World Bank.
The World Development Report 2001 is available at http://www.worldbank.org/wdi
