Finish this sentence in your head, or with those around you.
"In the last 30 years the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has...."
Now finish this next sentence in your head, or again, with those around you.
"In the last 30 years the proportion of Africa's population living in extreme poverty has...."
Which one is it? Increased? Decreased?
I'm not going to tell you yet
Perhaps because we have access to so much news from around the world, and perhaps recently the news about such events as Cyclone Idai and the impact it might have on perhaps more than one and a half million people's lives in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, that it's all doom and gloom out there.
We also, correctly, associate poverty with government corruption - when we see public money going into certain individuals' pockets by dint of their political association (in South Africa, I can hear people coughing Zuptas! Bosasa! VBS! - each an extreme example of politicians enriching themselves at the direct expense of the people they have sworn to serve) rather than to delivery of public services, we can't help but see that as a way for the populace to be or remain impoverished. And there's certainly no shortage of news about government corruption in South Africa, is there? Zuptas! Bosasa! VBS!
And in Africa? Liberia's central bank missing millions of banknotes, and the former President's son suspected of having taken them? African Presidents and their cronies making billions off hinky deals with shady companies and foreign governments? Residents of resource-rich countries such as Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo living in inexcusable conditions, while their politicians live lives of unimaginable luxury?
We also associate poverty with war and protracted conflict. A number of African countries continue to face ongoing conflict severe enough to drive people from their homes, a deadly recipe for poverty.
We also associate poverty with other long-term natural phenomena, such as droughts or climate change which is severe enough to affect agricultural potential of an area.
Africa is rich in many things, including corrupt politicians, conflict, extreme weather, and long-term climate vulnerability. So even if there's good news for the rest of the world, it can't be good news for Africa, can it?
It has to be the bad news we're all used to.
So today, let's look at the facts
Facts have a way of tripping up opinion for showing it up for what it is - stuff we make up because we like to believe it. And we love negative news. Before we try to finish the two sentences above, let's put them in global context and on a much longer time scale than just the last 30 years.
Oooh, look what's been happening in the last 30 years. When the United Nations (UN) adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it turns out they might not have been completely Polyanna over SDG1, "No poverty".
Here's what the UN has to say as background to SDG1:
- 783 million people live below the international poverty line of US$1.90 a day
- In 2016, almost 10 per cent of the world’s workers live with their families on less than US$1.90 per person per day
- Globally, there are 122 women aged 25 to 34 living in extreme poverty for every 100 men of the same age group.
- Most people living below the poverty line belong to two regions: Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa
- High poverty rates are often found in small, fragile and conflict-affected countries
- One in four children under age five in the world has inadequate height for his or her age
- As of 2016, only 45% of the world’s population were effectively covered by at least one social protection cash benefit.
- In 2017, economic losses due to disasters, including three major hurricanes in the USA and the Caribbean, were estimated at over $300 billion.
Oh dear, Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are still on the leaderboard for the wrong reasons.
Let's drill down a bit to see what's going on. I've taken a couple of these graphs from an amazing site called Our World in Data which has all kinds of useful visualisations, and most importantly, provides verified historical and current data to answer all kinds of questions about the world we live in.
Here's what the site had to say about global poverty since 1990:
In 1990, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. With a reduction to 735 million in 2015, this means that on average, every day in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015, 128,000 fewer people were living in extreme poverty.
On every day in the last 25 years there could have been a newspaper headline reading, “The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 128,000 since yesterday”.
But that's not the kind of news that makes headlines. Systemic progress doesn't make headlines; events do.
The charts I'll post here will be static, but if you go on the site you'll be able to click on countries of interest, move sliders over years to see trends, select datasets of particular interest, and a number of other cool features. It's well worth exploring as the charts themselves are really only doorways to the more interesting stories.
Here are some doorways for you
Let's start with a chart of the measure currently used to gauge whether someone lives in extreme poverty.
Here's another way of looking at the data since 1981.
And where do the poorest people live? In 2013, the picture looked like this:
Pretty much the Southern Hemisphere is where we still see challenges. But the trends are most interesting:
In fact, I got onto this topic today as I saw this article in a newsletter I receive called the Brookings Brief. It's free and is always a source of well-researched, interesting content.
Things have changed for the better - significantly - since 2013. Even I was surprised when I read this in the article:
Today, four countries already have poverty rates of below 3 percent: Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Mauritius, and Seychelles. Currently, Mauritania and Gambia are projected to join this group by 2030.
And I'm the good news kid!
It got better.
There are six additional countries whose poverty rates are expected to reach below 5 percent. With a slight acceleration of growth, these economies could also make extreme poverty history by 2030:
- Ethiopia, Africa’s second largest economy, is projected to lift 22 million people out of extreme poverty by 2030, reducing the percentage of Ethiopians living in extreme poverty from 25.6 percent today to 3.9 percent. If the poverty escape rate can be accelerated, the country will fulfill SDG 1 by 2030.
- Ghana is projected to lift approximately 2 million people out of poverty by 2030 while its population grows around 24 percent to 36.1 million. Even with this demographic challenge, the country will reduce the percentage of its total population living in extreme poverty to 4.5 percent from 12.5 percent today.
- Kenya will make a leap forward and is projected to lift 3.5 million of its citizens out of poverty. By 2030, Kenya will reduce the percentage of Kenyans living in extreme poverty from 20.9 percent today to 4.3 percent. The country will be achieving this milestone even though its population is projected to add around 23 million people.
- Angola is currently experiencing a short-lived period where poverty is rising. This began in September 2017. However, World Data Lab forecasts indicate that by 2021, extreme poverty will fall again and by 2030 it will be an estimated 3.5 percent. If this trend can be reversed sooner, then the country also stands a great chance of fulfilling SDG 1.
- Côte d’Ivoire will also make substantial progress in poverty reduction. By 2030, 5.3 million of its citizens are projected to be lifted out of poverty, bringing down the percentage of citizens living in extreme poverty from 17.2 percent today to 4.9 percent.
- Djibouti, the smallest country in this set of poverty-reducing economies, is projected to reduce relative poverty from 14.2 percent to 4.6 percent—lifting over 80,000 of its citizens out of poverty by 2030.
(I'm not sure about Ethiopia being Africa's second largest economy - usually the struggle is between South Africa and Nigeria, depending on whether you look at it on a per capita basis or not. But that's not the focus for today.)
This is seriously good news! Several of these countries are not the "usual suspects" for bringing people out of poverty. Frankly, with the looting the Dos Santos family has managed in Angola over the last few decades, I would have thought that the people would have remained in abject poverty for longer. And Equatorial Guinea? I thought all its riches had gone into its President's pockets. You see how that whole opinion thing works? I was wrong.
So how do you finish these sentences now?
"In the last 30 years the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has...."
"In the last 30 years the proportion of Africa's population living in extreme poverty has...."
If you're like the people in the UK that Our World in Data surveyed, your answer before reading this post would probably have been "increased" for both those sentences, so you would have been in comfortable company.
What's your view now?
References
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/news/communications-material/
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2019/03/28/poverty-in-africa-is-now-falling-but-not-fast-enough/?utm_campaign=Brookings%20Brief&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=71274287
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