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[ Back to Volume15 #1-2 Table of Contents ] [ back to Africa Recovery home ] [ Email this article ] From Africa Recovery, Vol.15 #1-2, page 37 Target the rural poor, says IFAD In Africa's countryside, the ranks of the poor keep growing By Simen Ekern The world community needs to devote greater attention to the needs of the rural poor, since the majority of the world's poor live in the countryside and will continue to do so until at least 2035, according to a new report by the UN's International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Despite this concentration of the poor in rural areas, the absolute value of aid to agriculture fell by two-thirds from 1987 to 1998, while overall investments in agriculture and rural areas decreased, notes IFAD's Rural Poverty Report 2001. "To succeed, poverty reduction programs must be refocused on rural people and on agriculture," argues Mr. Michael Lipton, director of the Poverty Research Unit at Sussex University in the UK, who contributed to the IFAD study. More specifically, the report emphasizes, reducing rural poverty will require promoting production of the staple foods that are so essential to the livelihoods of the rural poor, better allocating and distributing water, increasing the share of resources going to the rural poor, and giving special attention to the needs of women. Since little of this is now being done, world leaders will not meet their commitment last year at the UN Millennium Summit to cut global poverty in half by 2015, predicts the report. So far, only 10 million people are escaping poverty annually, instead of the projected 30 million. The ramifications of this failure are especially acute in sub-Sahara Africa, where the rate of poverty reduction will have to be six times greater to meet the deadline. Misconceptions "The failure stems in large part from a misconception that the main poverty problem has moved from the countryside to the burgeoning megacities of the developing world," commented Mr. Fawzi H. Al-Sultan, then-president of IFAD. (Mr. Lennart Båge has since been named IFAD president; see Watch page.) According to World Bank estimates, sub-Saharan Africa had 217.2 million people living on less than $1 a day in 1987, a figure that increased to 290.9 million by 1998. As the number of African poor has continued to climb, their share of the total population has scarcely declined, from 46.6 to 46.3 per cent over the same period. (See graph) Although IFAD confirms that the overall rate of poverty in Africa has not come down, a few countries have had an "appreciable decline in rural poverty." It specifically cites Ethiopia, which had high agricultural output in the early 1990s due to good rainfall, though growth has since slowed because of war. In addition, Uganda, with improved security in general, has experienced good growth performance, raising average incomes. In Mauritania and Zambia, there also were declines, but with poverty levels remaining high. In Zimbabwe, by contrast, there has been an evident increase in poverty. HIV/AIDS into the countryside In East and Southern Africa, all six countries surveyed in the report have higher rural than urban poverty rates. In West and Central Africa, rural poverty is higher than urban in nine out of ten surveyed countries. In poor households in West and Central Africa, between 20 and 30 per cent of children die before the age of five, a rate not experienced in much of Asia or the rest of Africa for the past half-century. HIV/AIDS, initially a problem of Africa's urban non-poor, now is increasingly infecting the rural poor as well. In light of such trends, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated at the time of the report's release that in order "to deal with urban as well as rural poverty in a sustainable way, we must give people in rural areas better opportunities to make a living." Overall economic growth will not be sufficient to reduce rural poverty, argues IFAD. Resources need to be carefully targeted, with a conscious effort to give the rural poor equitable access to institutions and markets. They also require productive resources, such as land, water, knowledge and technology; opportunities to participate in decentralized resource management; and access to micro-finance to expand their opportunities in the market. Labour-intensive approaches to agricultural development likewise benefit the poor. Women merit special attention in all these areas. Gaps between men and women hinder economic growth and human development, the report says, and such gaps are greater in rural areas, and greatest among the rural poor. Better cooperation between international donors and national governments is essential in the battle against poverty. But, stated Mr. Al-Sultan, "The fundamental partnership ... is with the poor themselves. They have the talents, the skills and the knowledge." [ Back to Volume15 #1-2 Table of Contents ] [ back to Africa Recovery home ] [ Email this article ] [ New Releases ] [ Magazine - Current/Past issues ] [ Index / Search ] [ About us ] [ UN Home ] [ UN News ] [ UN Key Reports ] [ UN Africa Links ] Material from this article may be freely reproduced, with
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