Extreme poverty spreading in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has continued to grow for 20 years, the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) said.
In its annual Industrial Development Report released on Tuesday, UNIDO described the region as "the last frontier in the fight against abject poverty" and said the international community and the countries concerned needed to step up efforts to promote economic growth there.
The rate of absolute poverty - people living on less than one dollar a day - in Sub-Saharan Africa is nearly 50 percent.
"While between 1981 and 2001 the number of people living in absolute poverty fell world-wide from 40 percent to 21 percent of the total population, in Sub-Saharan Africa it increased from 42 percent to 47 percent," UNIDO Director-General Carlos Magarinos said in a foreword to the report.
In order to halve extreme poverty in the region by 2015 as the UN aims to, incomes would have to stop shrinking as they did in the 1980s and 1990s and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita would need to grow on average more than four percent annually, UNIDO said.
Foreign aid would help countries reach very basic health, education and infrastructure standards, which in turn would aid economic growth. But the best way to tackle poverty, UNIDO said, was to promote economic growth by developing trade and industry.
"In the absence of economic growth, it will be impossible to move the people out of poverty," Magarinos told reporters, but added that poverty was also influenced by income distribution, which the report assumed would remain unchanged.
The United Nations has set itself a series of global "Millennium Development Goals" (MDGs) to achieve by 2015. They include halving absolute poverty compared to 1990, halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and establishing universal primary education.
"The accelerated economic growth that is necessary to achieve the MDGs and, just as importantly, to sustain them over time, can only be driven by the private sector," UNIDO said.
Governments need to tackle deep-rooted problems in economic structure and governance, it said. Diversifying economies and boosting agricultural productivity were also important.
Only a handful of the more than 30 Sub-Saharan countries were on track to reach the MDGs, UNIDO said: Benin, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Malawi and Uganda, each of which needed annual GDP per capita growth of less than two percent.
"Mozambique, Mauritania, South Africa and Botswana also face attainable growth-rate requirements," it said.