On the other hand, nagging questions remain about the extent to which Africa’s people’s lives have improved. As one taxi driver kept on telling us in Accra: “I can’t eat growth”. Unfortunately, there is little systematic evidence available to show our driver.
The challenge of assessing how much income poverty has come down is not made any easier by the lack of comparable, good quality data, even though there are in fact many more surveys now available. Scrutinizing the data to find out how much African livelihoods improved is what the team of the Poverty in A Rising Africa report set out to do.
The results are encouraging and sobering. The poverty rate has come down substantially and plausibly even more so than the available poverty estimates have led us to believe.
Scrutinizing the data and accounting for the lack of comparability and poor quality, the poverty rate has plausibly declined more than these standard estimates show.
Despite this generally good news, given rapid population growth, many more people are poor today than in 1990 (under the most optimistic scenario about 330 million in 2012, compared with 280 million in 1990). Looking forward, predictions indicate that the world’s $1.90-day-poor will be increasingly concentrated in Africa, even if the average 1995–2014 growth rates are maintained.
Substantial progress is also recorded in many other dimensions. Life expectancy at birth.Impressive as these facts are, the levels of achievement remain low, and worrisomely, the rate of progress is leveling off – especially the lack of progress in educational achievement which calls for serious attention.
In some sense, underlying much of the work in the report is the philosophy that which is not properly measured is not on the policy radar.
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