{"id":892,"date":"2015-03-12T13:00:54","date_gmt":"2015-03-12T12:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/?p=892"},"modified":"2016-10-28T13:15:06","modified_gmt":"2016-10-28T12:15:06","slug":"africa-meets-poverty-reduction-targets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/africa\/2015\/03\/12\/africa-meets-poverty-reduction-targets\/","title":{"rendered":"Africa Meets Poverty Reduction Targets"},"content":{"rendered":"

During my stay in Lagos, I met a woman who asked me what my impressions were. I told her\u00a0I found it hard to look at the poverty there, which surprised her, “Where do you see poverty?” she asked, pointing out the many signs of development there. As a matter of fact, poverty and wealth coexist in Nigeria and in so many other countries. So<\/strong>\u00a0how does Africa fair on its goal of reducing poverty?<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Africa is on time<\/a>” is the title of a report by staff of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.* Its main message is that Africa is on time for reducing poverty<\/strong>. Some of its main findings are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n
    \"Poverty<\/a>
    Poverty and wealth coexist in Africa<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Poverty in Africa is falling fast<\/strong>. Driven by economic growth, the % of African people living on less than $1\/day fell from 34% in 1990 to 21% in 2011, <\/span><\/a>\u00a0and this is projected to drop to 16.7% in 2015 \u2013 on time (except for DRC) to meet the Millennium Development Goal <\/a>of halving this % between 1990 and 2015. Analyses using other indicators also point to a fall in poverty.<\/li>\n

  2. Poverty reduction in Africa is taking place to all countries across the board<\/strong> regardless of their geography or other differences such as whether they are landlocked or coastal, mineral-rich or mineral-poor, have favorable or unfavorable for agriculture, and regardless of their colonial history. (See my\u00a0related posts on growth in Kenya <\/a>and Nigeria<\/a>.)<\/li>\n
  3. The study also presents evidence pointing to a reduction in income inequality: the Gini index<\/a> declined from .665 in 1990 to .63 in 2011. This index measures the extent to which the distribution of income within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution (0 = perfect equality; 1 = perfect inequality).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Two caveats with regard to the last point: (1) the decline in inequality doesn’t look proportional to the poverty reduction in Africa; and (2) the analysis is not done at the country (or groups of countries) level \u2013 if it had been it would have been quite interesting and illuminating.<\/p>\n\u00a0Poverty reduction in Africa is to be celebrated \u2013 more so if it goes hand-in-hand with social development <\/span><\/a>. But let’s not forget that millions of people still live in conditions of extreme poverty. Let’s not fall into the “globalization of indifference<\/a>“: poverty figures<\/a> mask the harsh reality of the lives of millions of our equals \u2013 each one of them, a unique human being with a unique life.<\/p>\n

    Business leaders have an important role to play here. A new\u00a0report by This is Africa<\/em> <\/a>reminds us that chief among economic opportunities is having a job.<\/strong> Many African business leaders have job creation as a top priority<\/a>. Can we learn anything from them?<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    * The study was published in 2014, it’s based on data from 1990-2011, and from countries for which enough data are available; some estimations are made for countries with insufficient data. It the authors’ views, not those of the bank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    During my stay in Lagos, I met a woman who asked me what my impressions were. I told her\u00a0I found it hard to look at the poverty there, which surprised her, “Where do you see poverty?” she asked, pointing out the many signs of development there. As a matter of fact, poverty and wealth coexist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1654,"featured_media":907,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99579,993,99106],"tags":[121,100452,8010,100451,1147,1267],"class_list":["post-892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-african-economic-and-institutional-context","category-living-conditions","category-future-and-perspectives-for-africa","tag-economic-growth","tag-gini","tag-inequality","tag-millennium-development-goal","tag-poverty","tag-social-development","megacategoria-mc-africa","megacategoria-mc-economics"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t