Poverty and poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa: A link to Agricultural Poverty Reduction Strategies
The problem of poverty and how to reduce it remains the most pressing dilemma in the many international development debates. More precisely, two questions are at the heart of much of academic research and public policy for development, namely: what is it that makes Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) the poorest region in the world and what can be done to deliver the sustainable and broad-based economic growth required to address this? This article seeks to provide an introduction to current debates on these two interrelated questions.
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| A section of zaina rice grown in Doho irrigation rice scheme, Butaleja. |
In addition, while there are many commonalities between countries in the region, there is also a great deal of diversity that a regional focus overlooks. Indeed, one of the main failings of development policies advocated by aid agencies has been an overly narrow, one-size-fits-all mentality that does not take country-specific constraints into account.
First and far most, poverty is not an easy concept to delineate. As a result, a range of definitions exist, influenced by different disciplinary approaches and ideologies. The dominant Western definition since World War II has defined poverty in monetary terms, using levels of income or consumption to measure poverty and defining the poor by a headcount of those who fall below a given income/consumption level or ‘poverty line.
However, this economic definition has been accompanied in recent years by other approaches that define poverty in a more multidimensional way. These approaches include the basic needs approach, the capabilities approach and the human development approach as proposed by UNDP. Their acceptance is reflected in the widespread use of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index (HDI), which is a composite measure of three dimensions of human development: (i) life expectancy, (ii) educational attainment and (iii) standard of living, measured by income in terms of its purchasing power parity.
It is also reflected in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) conceptualization of multidimensional poverty, defined as interlinked forms of deprivation in the economic, human, political, socio-cultural and protective spheres. For our purposes here, poverty is also defined by a sense of helplessness, dependence and lack of opportunities, self-confidence and self-respect on the part of the poor. Indeed, the poor themselves see powerlessness and voice-less-ness as key aspects of their poverty.
SSA is suffering from many forms of poverty. HDI scores in most countries of SSA have stagnated or declined since 1990, leaving this region as the poorest in the world. Indeed, 28 of the 31 low human development countries are in SSA. Analysis of income poverty is similarly disappointing. Since 1990, income poverty has fallen in all regions of the world except SSA, where there has been an increase both in the incidence and absolute number of people living in income poverty. This sees some 300 million people in SSA almost half of the region’s population living on less than US$1 a day.
For some in SSA, poverty is dynamic and transitory, resulting in different sectors and groups of the population moving in and out of poverty over time. For instance, there are points in the life cycle when poverty is more likely, and this is often correlated to dependency ratios. Poverty is more common in young families, for example, when asset ownership is lower and dependency ratios are higher. For others in SSA, poverty is chronic rather than transitory. This means poverty is experienced for most of one’s life, and often passed onto one’s children. In fact, all 16 of the countries considered ‘desperately deprived’ by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (CPRC) are found in SSA.
The Socio-Economic Drivers and Maintainers of Poverty in SSA
Risk and vulnerability
People everywhere face risks and vulnerabilities but poor people, especially those living in rural areas dependent on agriculture and in tropical ecologies, face more than others. This is true of a large proportion of SSA’s population. There are a number of risks and vulnerabilities that drive and maintain poverty in SSA, including harvest failure, market failure and volatility, conflict, and health shocks.
Harvest failure
Harvest failure is a key risk for rural households in SSA. Africa’s geography and agro-ecology (prone to drought as well as intense rain) combine with inefficient agricultural technologies and inadequate agricultural support and result in environmental degradation, unmanaged pests and poor access to inputs, which increase vulnerability. Harvest failure not only affects crop dependent households, but the wider rural economy (including households dependent on non-farm income sources) as well as national well-being and stability. It also can have long-term effects as people sell assets as a coping strategy. National budgets are also destabilized as trade (and national income) is reduced and relief has to be imported. The food crisis experienced in southern Africa between 2001-03 is a case in point. Heavy rains in the late growing season in 2001 triggered a harvest failure of maize, the region’s main staple. An immediate impact was felt by crop-dependent households. But harvest failure was not the only cause of this food crisis, for institutional weaknesses, political factors, donor policies, and economic inequalities also contributed. Together they led to a significant increase in prices across the region.
Market failure and market volatility
Market failure and market volatility increase the prevalence of poverty in SSA. This is because, in many instances, the poor do not possess the level of assets (both physical and human capital assets) required to protect themselves from shocks resulting from markets. Market fragmentation, inadequate institutional and infrastructural linkages (e.g. railway, roads, landline and mobile telecommunications) between local, national and international markets means that markets are poorly integrated, over both time and space. This not only affects physical markets but reduces producers’ and traders’ access to information that signals price changes, which limits their ability to change their patterns of production and trade to avoid economic shocks.
Conflict
A strong association is found between high levels of conflict and multidimensional poverty. For example, between 1997 and 2006, nearly 40% of low human-development states globally were found to be affected by armed conflict, compared with less than 2% of high and a third of medium human development states. This is significant because African countries are prone to conflict. In 2006 Africa, with 13% of the global population, had over 40% of the world’s violent conflicts; eleven countries were affected directly. Violent conflict has direct, immediate and devastating impacts, including injury, battlefield and civilian deaths, the destruction of household assets and displacement. It has indirect and long-term poverty impacts by increasing dependency ratios, resulting from an absence of men and an increase in the proportion of disabled and elderly, as well as women and children. It destroys public infrastructure and assets, disrupts livelihoods and reduces savings, undermines law and order and political processes, and causes social and cultural erosion and dislocation. It has generated millions of African refugees (over 3 million in 2006), which are costly for host countries as they put pressure on domestic resources, jobs, and services.
Health shocks
Sudden or prolonged ill health often results in a downward spiral of asset loss and impoverishment as people are forced to abandon productive activities. The relationship between ill health and poverty is complex and works in both directions: illness can cause poverty and poverty can contribute to poor health. Health statistics in SSA are alarming. The under-five mortality rate in 2005 was 166/1000 – a figure that has hardly improved in two decades and is twice the developing world’s average. Poor maternal health is a scandal, with the odds that a SSA woman will die from complications during pregnancy and childbirth at 1 in 16 – compared with a developed-world rate of 1 in 3800. Life expectancy in SSA is today lower than it was three decades ago, with an average life expectancy of about 50 years in 2000-05.
Low capabilities
A different way of thinking about the causes of poverty is to think in terms of capabilities. These, reflect a person’s freedom or ability to choose the way one wishes to live. These include the capacity to be free from hunger, to become educated, and to earn a decent living and as such, they are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. People trapped in persistent poverty tend to experience multiple ‘capability deprivations’ concurrently. That is, they are illiterate, have inadequate nutrition, poor human rights, and insufficient income and livelihood opportunities, which taken together drive and maintain their poverty and ensure it passes across generations People in SSA suffer from capability deprivations in a range of dimensions. For example, in the conflict affected communities of northern Uganda, livelihood and income-generating opportunities are extremely limited because people are forced to flee into internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. Living conditions in these are cramped; water and sanitation facilities are inadequate. These poor living conditions, accompanied by the inadequate provision of public services lead to poor health, which affects, among other things, educational outcomes. Poor health and education levels, combined with insecurity and weak governance, make it difficult to enact change. This multidimensional deprivation is not unique to Uganda. Indeed, it is found in a range of other conflict-affected regions of SSA (for example, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Chad, Somalia, Sudan). It is also found to a lesser degree in states where conflict is more low level, such as Swaziland and Zimbabwe, where rights are not protected and services are not provided (education, health, agriculture extension, for example) and people have reduced capacity to improve their lives.
Inequality, exclusion and adverse incorporation
Inequality, exclusion and adverse incorporation are key drivers and maintainers of poverty. Inequality, which is generally defined as the proportion of, and gaps between, the rich and the poor, can exist and contribute to poverty in a range of dimensions. Inequalities in income and other economic indicators, such as asset ownership, are often persistent, deeply rooted and typically a result of political forces that enable powerful groups to protect their wealth, and of market imperfections that make it difficult for those who have low incomes and low savings to accumulate capital. Importantly, then, in any society there is a generally positive relationship between high levels of income inequality and low school enrolment, low life expectancy, high fertility, corruption, insecure property rights and macroeconomic instability, which demonstrates the multidimensional impact of income inequality.
Limited livelihood opportunities
Unemployment in SSA was nominally 9.8% in 2006 and the number of unemployed had risen by 35.3% in the previous ten years (ILO, 2007: 2). But in reality because of the size of the agricultural and informal economies, significant numbers of un and under-employed people are never counted. Furthermore, the working poor make up a significant portion of the population. According to the ILO, in 2006 80% of Africans did not earn enough to lift themselves and their families above the US$2/day poverty line and one-half lived in extreme poverty (less than $US1 a day).
Non-developmental politics
Certain aspects of Africa’s political systems tend to hinder transformational change and poverty reduction efforts. This is because deep social forces create power relations, often referred to as a ‘neopatrimonial’ or ‘hybrid’ state, that share a number of characteristics. These include (i) a weak separation of the public and private spheres; (ii) the private appropriation of public resources (corruption); (iii) a regular use of clientelism, nepotism, and other vertical exchange relationships to maintain power; (iv) weak cross-cutting horizontal interests and relationships; (v.) the zero-sum (winner-take-all) nature of politics; (vi) a concentration of power in an individual (‘presidentialism’) who stands above the law; (vii) an absence of issue-based politics and political parties; and (viii) patron-client relations that are replicated at and link all levels of society.
Role of agriculture in the economy
The agricultural sector is at the heart of the economies of the least-developed countries (LDCs). It accounts for a large share of gross domestic product (GDP) (ranging from 30 to 60 percent in about two thirds of them), employs a large proportion of the labour force (from 40 percent to as much as 90 percent in most cases), represents a major source of foreign exchange (from 25 percent to as much as 95 percent in three quarters of the countries), supplies the bulk of basic food and provides subsistence and other income to more than half of the LDCs' population. The strong forward and backward linkages within the rural sector and with other sectors of the economy provide added stimulus for growth and income generation.
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| Farmers in Doho Irrigation rice scheme trasporting rice. |
Thus, significant progress in promoting economic growth, reducing poverty and enhancing food security cannot be achieved in most of these countries without developing more fully the potential human and productive capacity of the agricultural sector and enhancing its contribution to overall economic and social development. A strong and vibrant food and agricultural system thus forms a primary pillar in the strategy of overall economic growth and development. Agriculture in LDCs cannot continue to be treated as a residual sector for policy attention and investments.
No economy has been able to break the barriers of poverty without utilizing Agriculture. The article proposes the following priority measures;
a. The LDC governments must commit themselves to a coherent and comprehensive vision of agricultural and rural development. They need to design, implement and constantly review a series of priority and carefully timed measures necessary to boost investment in agriculture;
b. Establishing a strong institutional environment that improves access to markets, ensures dissemination of information, sets standards and provides an adequate legal and regulatory framework;
c. Enabling research and extension services to develop productive and robust technologies under farm conditions;
d. Upgrading the marketing, transport and communication infrastructure to support farmers’ access to seasonal and longer term capital and inputs, and providing them with strong price incentives;
e. Safeguarding natural resource and environment capacity
f. Maintaining sound and stable macroeconomic and trade policies that encourage investment in agriculture;
g. Strengthening human capital in rural areas through health and education services and access to productive resources.
Such ways need to be found to support LDCs with a view to improving their economic and social conditions, achieving structural transformation, diversification and international competitiveness, overcoming their supply-side constraints and, ultimately, accelerating sustainable growth.
Email:haumban@gmail.com
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