ABSTRACT

In terms of economics, there is no getting away from the fact that Africa is poor. The last two decades of the twentieth century saw many parts of the continent, particularly Africa south of the Sahara, come close to the point of financial collapse. In terms of Gross National Product (GNP), for example, the continent clearly produced less wealth for its people than other regions of the world (see Table 9.1). In 1995, Sub-Saharan Africa recorded a per capita GNP fifty-times smaller than that of the Western economies. This meant, for instance, that an average African economy, such as Mauritania, generated only US$460 for each of its citizens. The United States, by comparison, enjoyed US$26,980 per head. Mozambique, Africa’s poorest country, was even more disadvantaged. It had to make do with a per-capita GNP of just US$80.1

Macro-economic indicators such as GNP, however, fail to get across what this poverty actually means for individuals in Africa. When a country fails to develop its economy faster than its population grows, hardship inevitably results. A quick survey of social statistics illustrates this point. Sub-Saharan Africans in the 1990s, for example, died, on average, in their early fifties. Europeans and North Americans, on the other hand, had a life expectancy well into their seventies. At the other end of life, babies in Africa had ten times more chance of dying before their first birthday than did those born in the West. Even in the field of Africa’s post-colonial success stories, health and education, the comparisons are distressing. In 1995 over 40 per cent of Africans remained illiterate (with women particularly disadvantaged). In the West, literacy is almost taken for granted.2