THE DIFFERENT FACES OF POVERTY IN AFRICA

Africa, a continent endowed with immense natural and human resources as well as great cultural, ecological and economic diversity, remains underdeveloped!
The majority of the countries classified by the UN as least developed are in Africa.

Like in most development nations, poverty in Cameroon is wide spread, and the Menoua division is one the poorest area in Cameroon.

In the Menoua division poverty has many dimensions. Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter.

Poverty is being sick and not able to see a doctor. Poverty is not being able to go to school and not knowing how to read.

Poverty is losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water.

Poverty is living with less than $1.00 a day per household .

Poverty in Africa is predominantly rural. More than 70 per cent of the continent’s poor people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for food and livelihood, yet development assistance to agriculture is decreasing. In Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 218 million people live in extreme poverty. Among them are rural poor people in Eastern and Southern Africa, an area that has one of the world’s highest concentrations of poor people. The incidence of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is increasing faster than the population. Overall, the pace of poverty reduction in most of Africa has slowed since the 1970s.

Rural poverty in many areas of Africa has its roots in the colonial system and the policy and institutional restraints that it imposed on poor people. In recent decades, economic policies and institutional structures have been modified to close the income gap. Structural adjustments have dismantled existing rural systems, but have not always built new ones. In many transitional economies, the rural situation is marked by continuing stagnation, poor production, low incomes and the rising vulnerability of poor people. Lack of access to markets is a problem for many small-scale enterprises in Africa. The rural population is poorly organized and often isolated, beyond the reach of social safety nets and poverty programmes. Increasingly, government policies and investments in poverty reduction tend to favour urban over rural areas.

HIV/AIDS is changing the profile of rural poverty in Africa. It puts an unbearable strain on poor rural households, where labour is the primary income-earning asset. About two thirds of the 34 million people in the world with HIV/AIDS live on the African continent.