While Africa's poor face issues as diverse as the people themselves, some notable geographic and demographic categories and trends in African poverty can be identified, says an issues paper circulated by the UN's Office of the Special Coordinator for Africa and the Least Developed Countries (OSCAL) among participants in the high-level segment of the 1999 session of the UN Economic and Social Council (see article "How to combat women's poverty?").
Poverty has a disproportionately severe impact on African women, says the issues paper, "Measures to Stimulate an Enabling Environment for an Effective Implementation of Anti-Poverty Strategies in Africa." Therefore, OSCAL, which is within the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, cites the feminization of poverty as an "important concern" for the continent.
Because their work in the home and the workplace tends to be undervalued,
African women often are expected to work longer hours than men do, in low-wage
jobs under poor conditions. Moreover, African women's prospects for improving
their quality of life remain poor because of their high number of dependents,
limited access to economic resources and lack of education. These observations
underline the interrelationship between poverty, unemployment and gender
discrimination -- a central theme of the high-level segment of the ECOSOC
session.
Photo: OXFAM / P.
Brabran
OSCAL's study categorizes children, the elderly, and internally displaced and refugee populations as among those most vulnerable to poverty in Africa. And while poverty is "predominantly a rural phenomenon" at present, urban poverty is becoming an "increasing reality" in Africa, largely because rural-urban migration and urban growth rates are higher than those on other continents.
Although certain vulnerable groups can be identified, poverty in Africa is so large in scope, complex and multidimensional that no single, guaranteed solution could be possible, concludes OSCAL. But the conclusions stress that participatory, bottom-up approaches should be favoured over top-down approaches, which tend to reinforce dependency and further stigmatize the poor. Drawing on the work of Nobel Peace laureate Amartya Sen and other development economists, one of the OSCAL paper's main themes is that effective poverty solutions must be people-centred, empowering the poor themselves to tap their own, local resources.
Accounting for an estimated 20 per cent of the continent's total economic output and creating as many as 70 per cent of all new jobs this decade, Africa's informal sector is lauded as an "outstanding" example of bottom-up development. Women have a particularly strong presence in the small entrepreneurial ventures that make up the informal sector (although the sector's participants cut across all social groups). The study cites formal and informal education, technical and vocational training and microcredit schemes as key to empowering informal sector participants. It deems microcredit an especially important element in view of the general inability of poor people to access formal credit services, particularly in rural areas.
Because many non-governmental and grassroots organizations, women's organizations and other civil society organizations (CSOs) are participatory, responsive to local needs and able to mobilize communities and empower specific groups of poor people, they have an important role to play in poverty eradication at the local level. CSOs also tend to be more flexible than national governments and better able to target resources to specific groups, notes the study.
At the same time, the study points out that anti-poverty strategies at the national level tend to give too much emphasis to micro initiatives and insufficient attention to the impact of macro-policy on the poor. National governments are advised to place a higher priority on the reform of marketing, pricing, tax and credit laws and policies to improve poor people's access to productive resources.
While the focus of poverty eradication must be at the local, national
and regional levels, a decisive commitment at all levels -- including international
-- is a prerequisite to sustained poverty eradication, says the paper. The
international community has a crucial role to play in helping create and
maintain an enabling environment for the sustained growth of African economies,
especially by providing debt relief, development assistance and market access.
