Africa, Millennium Development Goals Keywords:, poverty, economic growth

More than a decade has passed since the adoption of the UN Millennium Declaration in 2000. The document defines eight "development goals" for the period up to 2015.

These include the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger; ensuring universal primary education; taking measures to achieve gender equality and empower women; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; reducing the incidence of HIV / AIDS, malaria, etc. diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; building a global partnership for development.

According to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, " achieving the Goals is everyone's business. To fail at this is to increase the dangers of our world, from instability to epidemics and the destruction of ecological systems. And, on the contrary, achieving the Goals will allow... accelerate the path to a more stable, just and secure world. " ¹

The positive economic growth dynamics observed in the South at the beginning of the twenty-first century and preceding the global recession of 2008 allowed many regions to embark on the path to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and achieve some success. The global financial and economic crisis has slowed down the process, but the world as a whole is still on track to achieve the MDGs, although it requires increased efforts both internally and externally, in particular by ensuring that development partners meet their commitments without delay.

PLACE OF AFRICA

There are significant differences between countries and regions in terms of the rate of achievement of the MDGs. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has lagged far behind other developing regions in this respect from the very beginning. Suffice it to say that in 1990 (the reference year for MDG monitoring), the poverty rate in Tropical Africa was estimated at 58% of the total population (the highest in the world)²; in absolute terms, this amounted to about 300 million people living in extreme poverty on an income of less than $1.25 per person per day.

However, significant progress has been made in countries of the region on a number of MDGs (primary education coverage, AIDS control, and reduction of child mortality). It should be noted that the beginning of the global crisis in 2008 was preceded by a period of significant improvement in human development indicators in many African countries due to the unprecedented high economic growth rates in 2000-2007.³ Thus, the world's highest increase in primary education enrollment in the last decade (by 36%) was observed in the SSA countries, although this is why In this indicator, the region as a whole still lags behind other developing regions. Active efforts to combat AIDS and other communicable diseases have reduced the annual number of new HIV-infected people in SSA countries by more than 25% since the mid-1990s, and the under-five mortality rate has decreased by 22% over the same period.

For all the other MDGs (eliminating extreme poverty and hunger, reducing unemployment, ensuring gender equality, reducing maternal mortality, etc.), most countries in sub-Saharan Africa have yet to reach their target countries.

Millennium Development Goals*

* Compiled by the author.

it is very far from achieving the goals set out in the Declaration. Moreover, poverty, hunger and unemployment are widespread (although relative rates are declining), gender inequality remains high, especially in education and employment, and maternal mortality is not declining.

The situation in North Africa differs significantly across almost all the MDGs. The goals and targets set out in the Millennium Declaration have either been met or are close to completion by the target date (2015), with the exception of full and productive employment and gender equality in the labour market.

POVERTY IN THE WORLD...

As a result of the rapid development of the South in the first half of the 2000s, the level of extreme poverty in the developing world as a whole declined markedly. Despite continued population growth, the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day in the South has fallen from about 1.8 billion in 1990 to 1.4 billion in 2005, while the overall poverty rate has fallen from 46% to 27% of the population.⁴ According to the UN forecast, the global poverty rate will not exceed 15% by 2015, which is significantly lower than the target of reducing poverty to 23%. However, this

The global trend mainly reflects the rapid growth of living standards in East Asia, especially in China. India has also made a significant contribution to reducing global poverty. In these two countries, combined, the number of extremely poor people fell by about 455 million between 1990 and 2005, and by 2015, the number of extremely poor people in the world was estimated to have declined by more than half. it should decrease by another 320 million ⁵.

The new geography of global poverty, its distribution by country and region, is interesting. There have been drastic changes here in recent years. Until recently, the question of where the poor are most likely to live today might have seemed rhetorical: of course, in low-income countries, including the least developed, vulnerable States, etc. And indeed, it was.

Recent research by British scientists led by E. Sumner (the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex) has shown that today the majority of the poor no longer live in low-income countries (LICs), as it was only two decades ago, when 93% of the world's poor were located in these countries. According to their calculations, 960 million poor people ("new bottom billion", in Sumner's words), or 72% of all the world's poor, live today in middle Income Countries (MICs, MICS), with the majority of them (61%). lives in stable countries. And only about 1/4 of the world's poorest people live in 40 LIC countries, most of which are located in sub-Saharan Africa.⁶

How did it happen? Since 2000, more than 700 million poor people living in low-income countries have "moved" to middle-income countries (MICS) as these countries move from one category to another (according to the World Bank classification). And it's not just about China or India. Even without them, the share of the poor in MIC countries tripled (from 7% to 22%), due to such populous countries as Indonesia, Pakistan and Nigeria, and completely "unexpected" countries that received a new status (for example, Sudan, Angola and Cameroon). In one decade, the total number of LICs decreased from 63 in 2000 to 40 in 2011, and this trend is likely to continue*. Today, 2/3 of the world's poor, or 854 million people, live in the world's most populous countries (China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Nigeria) ^.7

...AND IN AFRICA

And what is happening in Africa?⁸ Sub-Saharan Africa has for many decades outpaced all other developing regions in terms of poverty, i.e., the proportion of poor people in the total population. The level of extreme poverty here began to decline only in the late 1990s (58% in 1990, 58% in 1999, and 51% in 2005).⁹. More recent data are not yet available, but some estimates suggest that extreme poverty rates in the region had fallen to 46% by 2008, a decrease of 12% over a ten-year period.

In quantitative terms, the total number of people living below the poverty line has declined in all regions of the world except SSA, where, due to rapid population growth, it increased by almost 100 million people from 1990 to 2005, to 390 million. The global crisis has added about 50 to 60 million people to these figures.¹⁰ Thus, despite a clear downward trend in the proportion of people living in extreme poverty in SSA countries since the late 1990s, this region remains the only one on the planet where poverty continues to increase (i.e., the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of decline in the share of the poorest population), and the first Millennium Development Goal here is In general, it will not be achieved (the target is 29%), unlike in other developing regions.

However, the statement of this fact does not fully reflect the real picture, since the SSA countries have actually improved the situation in recent years. For more than a decade, they have made considerable efforts to implement almost all the MDGs, including poverty reduction, but their path to achieving these goals has been much more difficult than in other regions due to the lower baseline. In such a short period of history, it was extremely difficult for countries in Tropical Africa to cover the distance between them and the poverty target, as by 1990 a significant part of the region's population was well below the poverty line. In addition, these States began to implement reforms later than others and therefore later received the benefits of accelerated income growth.

As the Indian scholar J. R. R. Tolkien writes:Bhagwati, in his article "It is Time to rethink", said that it is useless (and even unacceptable) to set common MDG targets for all countries by comparing the experience of India and sub-Saharan Africa. In the first case, a significant reduction in poverty was achieved even before the MDGs were announced (more than 10 years ago), thanks to increased income growth following the liberal reforms of 1991, which lifted almost 200 million Indians out of poverty.

* The last African country to move from the LIK to the MIC category was Ghana in 2011.

On the contrary, for most African States, the goal of halving the poverty rate seems too optimistic, since these countries, in addition to having extremely difficult starting conditions, suffer from the shortcomings of exceptionally poor governance for many reasons.¹¹ A number of other researchers agree with him, calling the MDGs "too ambitious" for Tropical Africa.¹²

The picture is quite different in North Africa, where the proportion of the population with an income of less than $1.25 per day was only 5% in 1990, 4% in 1999, and 3% in 2005. This is the lowest rate of extreme poverty in the entire developing world (followed by the Middle East at 6% and Latin America at 7%). In other words, in this sub-region of the African continent, the goal of halving poverty under the first Millennium Development Goal has already been achieved or will be achieved by 2015.

The problem of poverty is compounded by the specifics of demographic processes. The population growth rate on the African continent has been the highest in the world for several decades (2.4%) and, despite its slowdown, will remain so in the twenty-first century. The United Nations estimates that Africa is currently home to about 15% of the world's population (1 billion people). person). If current trends continue, the share of Africa in the world's population will reach 17% by 2025, and by 2050, according to the average version of the forecast, -24%. According to I. O. Abramova, the growth of the world population in the next 40 years will largely occur at the expense of its African component, with all the consequences that follow from this.¹³

Continued rapid population growth in Africa threatens to further increase poverty, exacerbate the labor market situation and increase emigration in search of work. It is projected that 1/3 of all Africans will continue to be in extreme poverty in 2060, living on less than $1.25 a day. In other words, chronic poverty on the continent, passing from generation to generation, will remain a fact of life for a long time.

POVERTY PARAMETERS

International statistics use World Bank thresholds of $1.25 and $2.0 per person per day to quantify global poverty. However, to fully cover the problems associated with poverty and its dynamics, it is not enough to use only monetary measures of poverty that reflect income poverty: we need a comprehensive analysis of all aspects of the life of the poor-life expectancy, education coverage, adult literacy, access to drinking water, etc.

Nobel Prize winner in Economics (1998) Amartya Sen (India) was one of the first to show that people's well-being should be assessed not by income level, but by the ability to meet the most important human needs: health, knowledge and a decent lifestyle, since it is precisely the lack of freedom of choice that prevents people from realizing and expanding their opportunities, which means that ultimately, it leads to degradation and poverty.

Based on the concept of A. Sen, a group of economists led by Pakistani Mahbub-ul-Haq in 1990 developed the human Development Index (HDI), calculated on the basis of GDP per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP), life expectancy and education of the population.

Since 1990, the index has been published annually in reports of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). on human development. In 2010, in addition to the HDI used, which is a composite indicator based on average country statistics, three new indicators: human development with inequality (HDI), gender inequality (IGI), and multidimensional poverty (IMP), replacing the Population Poverty Index (TIN).

For a long time, scientists from the University of Oxford worked on the development of the Multidimensional poverty Index (IMB) within the framework of the Oxford Initiative for the Study of Poverty and Human Development (the greatest contribution was made by S. Alkir and M. Santos). Unlike the HDI, which measures a country's average progress in human development, the IMB reflects multiple types of deprivation (deprivation) in the areas of health, education, and living standards at the micro-level (household level) and provides a more complete picture of the scale and nature of poverty compared to indicators of income-based poverty.

This index is calculated on the basis of 10 indicators, including nutrition, child mortality rate, education coverage, access to drinking water and sanitation services, availability of fuel for cooking, etc. If a household lacks one - third of all indicators, it is identified as poor, while if it lacks half or more, it is identified as extremely poor14.

The first results of the Oxford Initiative research were published in 2010 and then in 2011.-

The country's VAT in 2011 was 109 (5.3 billion rubles). people, or 79% of the world's population). As a result, the study covered 93% of people living in low-and middle-income countries. Based on the results of the study, based on the application of the multidimensional poverty index, it was concluded that today there are 1.65 billion poor people in the world (31% of the 5.3 billion poor). people covered by the study), while the MIC countries have twice as many beggars as the LIC countries (1.19 billion people). people against 460 million). Thus, the conclusion made earlier by E. Sumner regarding the "new poorest billion", whose place of residence was the MIC ¹⁵ countries, is confirmed.

The distribution of poor people by country and region is as follows: half of the world's poor (827 million people) live in South Asia, and more than a quarter (29%, or 473 million people) live in sub-Saharan Africa ^.16 At the same time, it is Africa that has the highest IMB rates in the world, indicating the depth of poverty measured by the intensity of deprivation per household. Thus, according to the Human Development Report 2011, the highest indicators of the multidimensional poverty index are recorded in the countries of Tropical Africa (Niger, Ethiopia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Somalia, Central African Republic, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia).¹⁷. Top ten countries in terms of extreme poverty (income less than $1.25 per day) It also includes African countries (Liberia, Burundi, Rwanda, Malawi, Madagascar, Tanzania, Nigeria, Zambia, Swaziland, and the Central African Republic).¹⁸. The countries of the same region (DRC, Niger, Burundi, Mozambique, Chad, Liberia, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Guinea)complete the world ranking on the human development index¹⁹.

It is striking that for almost all three dimensions of poverty, the first places in the ranking of the poorest countries in the world are occupied, with a few exceptions, by the same countries in Africa. The classification of countries by average per capita income, as many experts in the field of poverty research believe, masks problems with poverty. For example, Zimbabwe is a low-income country, but it has the same number of poor people as Namibia (an above-average country) - 40%, and Sierra Leone and Angola, countries belonging to different income categories, have the same proportion of multi-dimensional poor - 77%. Overall, sub-Saharan Africa has not only the highest level of extreme poverty (51%), but also the highest multidimensional poverty index in the world (66%)^.20

ECONOMIC GROWTH AND POVERTY REDUCTION

These averages conceal significant differences between countries. Take Ghana, for example, which has made significant progress towards achieving the extreme poverty reduction target. The share of the extremely poor in the total population declined from 51% in 1992 to ^{39% in 1998 and 30% in 2006.21}

Economic growth has undoubtedly played an important role in ensuring this progress, but in the context of Africa, it cannot be the only factor. For example, official statistics show that some sub-Saharan African countries, where growth rates were no lower or even higher than in Ghana, have barely reduced poverty levels (for example, Angola, Sierra Leone, and Sudan), while others, such as Liberia and Chad, have even increased them22. There is no direct correlation between economic growth and poverty reduction, which is confirmed by the historical development experience of the continent's countries, which indicates that economic growth is significantly less effective in reducing poverty in these countries compared to other regions. Some experts estimate that the income elasticity of poverty, that is, the degree to which income increases lead to poverty reduction, is almost one-third lower in sub-Saharan Africa than in other developing countries.²³

It is clear that while economic growth is a prerequisite for poverty reduction and progress towards achieving the MDGs, it is not sufficient in itself, as was explicitly stated in the report of the UN Secretary-General at the UN Millennium Development Goals Summit in September 2010.24 ^The nature of growth is also important. The African experience shows that growth in the agricultural sector (where more than 3/4 of the self-employed population is employed) increases the incomes of the poorest segments of the population, which is crucial not only for reducing poverty, but also for fighting hunger.

Ghana's success in significantly reducing extreme poverty was attributed to a reduction in rural poverty. In other words, to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, it is necessary to ensure priority growth in sectors (primarily agriculture) that directly benefit the poor, which is a much more effective means of reducing poverty than simply increasing the pace of economic development.

Moreover, this growth must be combined with comprehensive policies that benefit the poor. This includes investments in creating additional economic opportunities, providing basic social services (health, education, water supply, sanitation, etc.), women's empowerment, employment and social protection programs, money transfers, etc. All of these measures serve as a catalyst for progress across the MDGs.

Progress in reducing poverty requires a more equitable distribution of the benefits of economic growth. According to a group of English researchers, growth itself is "not the easiest way" to achieve the MDGs; distribution is the link between them. While not denying the importance of economic growth for achieving the MDGs, they point out that Governments and the private sector need to focus on a more equitable distribution of income from growth in order to ensure improvements in human development indicators and, in turn, the achievement of MDG ²⁵.

It should be said that this thesis is not new, since back in the 70s of the last century, a new approach to development was outlined in the Western economic literature, associated with increased attention to social issues, in particular, to the problems of employment and income distribution (this approach is known as "redistribution with growth", " from growth - In the last twenty years, with the development of the concept of human development and the introduction of the corresponding concept into international and scientific circulation, it was officially recognized that "human development is the goal, and economic growth is only a means to achieve it" ²⁶.

The obvious fact that sub-Saharan Africa, as a region, will not be able to meet the target of halving poverty by 2015 does not mean that individual countries will not be able to do so. The continent is too heterogeneous not to see this and use only average data.

According to MDG monitoring data, two countries (Gambia and Mauritania) have already reduced poverty by half since 1990 and thus reached the 2015 target, while several others-Botswana, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal and Kenya-are approaching goal ²⁷.. A number of other African countries (Mali, Guinea, and the Central African Republic) have recently experienced high rates of poverty reduction.

Thus, while the sub-Saharan region as a whole is significantly behind in achieving the goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015, a number of countries that are making good progress in this direction will still be able to achieve the first of the "Millennium Development Goals", if not by the deadline set, then soon after.

(To be continued)

¹ The Millennium Development Goals Report 2010. UN. N.Y., 2010, p. 3.

² The Millennium Development Goals Report 2011. UN. N.Y., 2011, p. 6.

^{Fituni L. L.} 3 Ekonomika Afrika: vyzovy poskrizisnogo razvitiya [Africa's Economy: Challenges of Post-crisis Development].

⁴ The Millennium Development Goals Report 2011.., p. 6.

⁵ Ibid., p. 7.

^{Kanbur R., Sumner A.} 6 Poor Countries or Poor People? Development Assistance and the New Geography of Global Poverty. N.Y., 2011, p. 3.

^{Sumner A.} 7 The New Bottom Billion: What if Most of the World's Poor Live in Middle-Income Countries? // CGD Brief. 2011, p. 1 -http://www.cgdev.org

^{Vigand V. K., Korendyasov E. N.} 8) Offensive on poverty in Africa / / Asia and Africa Today, 2009, No. 1.

⁹ The Millennium Development Goals Report 2009. UN. N.Y., 2009, p. 6.

¹⁰ The Recovering from the Crisis: The Implementation of the Global Jobs Pact in Africa. ILO. Geneva, 2009, p. 5; The Millennium Development Goals Report 2010.., p. 7.

¹¹ Finance & Development .IMF. Washington, September 2010, p. 15.

^{Oya C.} 12 Africa and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs): What's Right, What's Wrong and What's Missing // Revista de Economia Mundial 27, 2011; Easterly W. How the Millennium Development Goals Are Unfair to Africa // World Development, 2009, N 37 (1).

¹³ Abramova I. O. Developing countries in the world economy of the XXI century: new demographic determinants / / Asia and Africa Today, 2011, N 6; New role of Africa in world demographic processes / / Asia and Africa today, 2009, N 1.

^{Bragina E. A.} 14 Why is the international poverty index changing // Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn, 2011, No. 2.

^{Alkire S., Roche J.M., Seth S.} 15 Sub-national Disparities and Intertemporal Evolution of Multidimensional Poverty across Developing Countries. Oxford, 2011, p. 12 - 13.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 13.

¹⁷ Human Development Report 2011. UNDP. N.Y., 2011, p. 144 - 145.

¹⁸ Ibidem.

¹⁹ Ibid, p. 133 - 134.

^{Alkire S., Roche J.M., Seth S.} 20 Op. cit., p. 15.

²¹ Finance & Development. September 2010, p. 11.

²² African Economic Outlook 2011. AfDB/OECD. 2011, p. 252 - 253; Human Development Report 2010.UNDP. N.Y., 2010, p. 162 - 163.

^{Fosu A.K.} 23 Inequality and the Impact of Growth on Poverty: Comparative Evidence for Sub-Saharan Africa. Manchester, 2009.

²⁴ Keeping the Promise. Report of the Secretary-General. UN. N.Y.,

2010, p. 13.

²⁵ Economic Growth and the MDGs. ODI. L., 2010, p. 4.

²⁶ Human Development Report 1996. UNDP. N.Y., 1996, p. 1.

²⁷ Assessing Progress in Africa toward the MDGs. UNECA. N.Y.,

2011, p. 4; Rethinking Poverty. Report on the World Social Situation 2010. UN. N.Y., 2009, p. 23.

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