ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on grossly inadequate healthcare as another dimension of poverty. Processes of circular causation are clearly at work in eastern and southern Africa, with low income contributing to ill health and this in turn contributing to low income. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s health for all by 2000 was part of the global anti-poverty agenda. Immunisation of infants against measles, polio and tuberculosis made great strides in the 1960s and 1970s and even in countries such as Malawi and Tanzania the great majority continue to be immunised. In Mozambique there was rapid recovery in the 1990s from the breakdown brought about by civil war. The chapter also focuses on adult literacy, which is an important facet of poverty, and one which reflects educational deficiency in past decades. South Africa is less exceptional within our region in this respect than in most others, with an adult literacy level only a little higher than Zimbabwe, Zambia and Kenya.
