ABSTRACT
Sub-Saharan Africa is the region in which poverty is at once most acute and paradoxically at the same time least understood. This state of affairs can be explained to a large extent by the lack and/or doubtful quality of available data (see Chapter 11). For the most part, analyses of poverty based on statistical information are merely monographic and only very rarely take account of the temporal dimension. To go beyond merely anecdotal observations to obtain an overview of poverty in all its complexity it is necessary to produce an analysis of its evolution over time which takes into account the macroeconomic and social context of the country under consideration. We have therefore concentrated on African capitals in which the incidence of poverty has markedly progressed, and in which, concomitantly, a major restructuration of the socio-economic environment is taking place. On the basis of a certain number of factors derived from statistical data and illustrated by specific examples, we will attempt to draw up an inventory of the situation in the continent’s major cities and evaluate the impact of the recessionary trend of national economies on their populations’ living standards.
