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Human
Development Remains an African Dream
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A
growing gap between rich and poor reinforces poverty in Africa |
This July, the UN launched its annual Human
Development Report twice, as if to underscore the massive and shocking
differences in its human development rankings, depending in which part of the
world you happen to live.
The
first launch was in Ireland whose economy – now dubbed the “celtic tiger”
– has grown so rapidly in the last ten years it has brought about equally
rapid changes to Ireland’s once traditional, agrarian society and culture. The
second was in Maputo, Mozambique, where African heads of state were meeting at
the African Union Summit. Most countries in Africa cannot claim the same
economic advancement as that of Ireland, and for many African countries the UN
report makes grim reading. Indeed, the report makes clear that Africans have
been the principal victims of the “development” policies of the last decade
or so: policies that have encouraged increasingly stark divisions between rich
and poor. Thus while the report paints a world of winners and losers in the
global economics of development, it also questions how far such economics can be
considered either efficient or fair if the costs of generating “winners”
like those in Ireland are borne by the acute suffering of the “losers” in
Africa, and elsewhere.
Africans have been the principle victims the policies of the last decade. |
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The
UN report certainly puts into sharp relief any illusion we may harbor that the
path of human development is one of steady progress. In a sharp reminder of the
inequities of the age, the report demonstrates how while some parts of the world
boomed in the 1990s, and others experienced steady if not spectacular growth, 50
countries actually experienced a decline in human development - measured by the
UN by the key indices of income levels, literacy and life expectancy. While
parts of ex-communist Eastern Europe, and South East Asia rank low on the HD
index, most of those countries which saw their living standards drop over the
last 10 years are in Africa. The statistics make the scale and impact of this
reversal abundantly clear. In his article, “The Lost Decade,” Economist
Larry Elliott writes:
The
richest 1% of the world's population (around 60 million) now receive as much
income as the poorest 57%, while the income of the richest 25 million Americans
is the equivalent of that of almost 2 billion of the world's poorest people. In
1820 western Europe's per capita income was three times that of Africa's; by the
90s it was more than 13 times as high. In Norway, top of the UN's league table
for human development, life expectancy at birth is 78.7 years, there is 100%
literacy and annual income is just under $30,000. At the other end of the scale,
a newborn child in Sierra Leone will be lucky to reach its 35th birthday, has a
two in three chance of growing up illiterate and would have an income of $470 a
year.
The
Guardian, July 9, 2003
In
the words of the report:
For
many countries the 1990s were a decade of despair. Some 54 countries are poorer
now than in 1990. In 21, a larger proportion is going hungry… In 14, more
children are dying before age five. In 12, primary school enrolments are
shrinking. In 34, life expectancy has fallen. Such reversals in survival were
previously rare.
UN
Human Development Report, 2003
Why,
in a world of plenty, have so many countries, especially in Africa, fared so
badly? Among a plethora of deep seated and complex reasons, several stand out as
being of particular significance. The first is the global economic climate in
which poorly developed economies operate. As a result of colonialism, such
economies, which comprise the majority in Africa, have historical and structural
inequalities built into their relationship with the developed world.
African economies have inequalities built into their relationship with the developed world. |
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In
the 1990s, a further set of crippling conditions were imposed across Africa by
international finance institutions such as the IMF and World Bank in the name of
globalization and neo-liberalism. These included restructuring packages that
forced African economies to spend more on debt repayments than on health and
education, and to sell off state industries and open their markets to foreign
capital. At the same time, the market in commodities – Africa’s main export
sector – collapsed, while no attempt was made to address the massive subsidies
given to Western agriculture and manufacturing. Despite the rhetoric then, no
real attempt was made to place human development goals at the heart of the
global economic system. The result has been that the rich have got richer, and
it is the poor of the world who are paying the price.
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AIDS
has taken millions of African lives |
The
second reason is the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which has stolen millions of African
lives in the last decade and looks set to steal millions more. HIV/AIDS has
devastated already poor households across Africa and it has left thousands of
orphaned children in its wake. All of these people are pushed to the absolute
margins of existence by the burden of the disease in conditions where health
care systems are unable to cope. Chillingly, however, the rights of infected
people in the developing world to access to treatment is still the subject of a
bitter dispute at the World Trade Organization, when such treatment could
immediately and effectively prevent countless deaths and could return a degree
of health and normalcy to countless numbers of lives.
There is little incentive to foster economic stability or democracy. |
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The
third reason is the social and political conditions within Africa itself.
Because Africa has been kept out of the “virtuous” circle of global
capitalism, this has forced traditional societies to adjust to modernization
under the harshest of conditions. As a result, there is little concern or
incentive to foster economic stability or democracy. In many parts of Africa,
first world economies nestle within third world economies, with little or no
integration between them. While the third world agrarian sector suffers under
falling commodity prices, unfair terms of trade, and privatization, indigenous
and foreign elites make fortunes on unregulated industries such as oil and
mining, or on the trappings of high office. Genuine democracy is thus
notoriously slow to develop. Even in important regional powers such as Nigeria
and Zimbabwe, elections are routinely rigged, and there is a repeated failure on
the part of African leaders to effectively police and regulate themselves. The
end result is that the levels of political and economic integration needed if
African countries and their peoples are to develop successfully simply fail to
materialize.
If
such structural conditions are the background reasons why African countries
perform so badly, their effects are all too obvious; not just in the grim
statistics, but in the real stunting of so many people’s lives those figures
represent.
Amongst
such grim statistics, there are some success stories, however. For example,
Mauritius, Tanzania, the Seychelles and Mozambique have achieved GDP growth
rates close to the 7-8% needed to meet the poverty targets set out in the UN
Millennium Development Goals. Swaziland and Malawi have increased school
enrolment by over 20% in the past decade. Senegal and Uganda appear to be
successfully managing the spread of HIV/AIDS and Egypt, the Gambia, Cape Verde
and Tunisia have reduced child mortality by one-third. Such successes are but a
tiny fraction of what is needed, and what could be achieved in Africa if the
political will was there to do so – but that is exactly what they reflect: the
political will to really tackle the problems at hand.
According to UNHDR, liberal markets are no longer the solution for human development problems. |
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The
UN report offers its own perspectives on what needs to be done. It argues that
we can no longer rely on liberalizing market economics as a panacea for human
development problems: the record of the 1990s has shown us that this leads to
greater, not less, poverty for those unable to exploit the fruits of
liberalization. Instead, it urges a range of remedies if the UN Millennium
Development Goals are to be met in Africa in 2015 rather than a century later.
Perhaps most importantly, these include the need for interventionist economic
policies that make meeting people’s basic needs the primary goal of economic
policy. Such a strategy necessitates rapid and sustained reform to the
macroeconomic terms in which such countries do business, including restructuring
debt repayments, reforming the global terms of trade to make them fairer to
developing countries, and allowing states the freedom to set the pace of their
own industrial and infrastructural development.
But
the report also argues that economics alone cannot lift poor people out of the
extreme marginal position they now find themselves in. There is also a need for
democracy to be fostered, so that poor people are not just victims, or objects
of policy, but are enabled to speak out about what they want and to directly
participate in shaping policy themselves.
Without democracy, the poor will not break the cycle of oppression they are structurally trapped in. |
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It
is here, perhaps, that the successes of the 1990s have had most impact. As the
power of the state to determine policy was eroded in the 1990s, many
non-governmental organizations – or NGOs – were drafted in, across Africa
and in the developing world more generally, to fill the gap. Many of these
organizations are primarily concerned with humanitarian relief and service
provision, but some directly engage with the thornier issues of political and
economic equity and accountability – at local, national and international
levels. There is now a powerful understanding that without the capacity to
participate in economic and political processes, poor people will remain unable
to liberate themselves from the cycle of oppression they are politically and
structurally trapped in. Cultivating participation is primarily a grassroots
issue; it’s about finding ways for people to empower themselves, and to get
those national and international leaders who have so much power over them to
listen.
In
this respect, there are many hopeful and inspiring examples of such action
across Africa. Treatment access campaigns have brought the issue of access to
affordable medicines for HIV/AIDS to the fore across the continent, as well as
raising crucial debates about sexual practices, gender and human rights. In
South Africa, poor groups have mobilized to fight the water and electricity cut
offs township neighborhoods are suffering, and in Zimbabwe, opposition groups
continue to battle for free and fair elections and for a democratic state. Such
grassroots politics are, inevitably, the context in which genuine human
development demands are formulated. They remain the most inspiring examples of
how people can harness their own power to bring about a better world for
themselves, their families and their neighborhoods.
They
can also get results. Alliances between pressure groups and national and
international organizations are becoming more frequent in Africa. Local groups
are beginning to be recognized as an important and legitimate aspect of the
governance process, even if many remain sharply critical of government
practices. Partnerships between donors, states and local organizations are the
most effective way to ensure that local needs are articulated on the one hand
and resources targeted directly to those needs on the other. Strategic
partnerships are also beginning to develop between policy-based NGOs who are
highly critical of the ways in which African countries are positioned in the
global economic order, and state departments who are on the front lines in
resisting the encroachment of outside economic interests and negotiating better
deals for their countries and regions.
The
problem is, national and international leaders are not listening enough to make
positive partnerships with the people of Africa sustained and widespread.
Denying poor people a place at the negotiating table keeps them invisible, and
is thus the most effective strategy for keeping them poor. There is still a long
way to go before the most vulnerable in the world have their voices listened to,
but if the shocking disparities in fortune between the wealthy and the
impoverished are to be reversed, it is absolutely vital that the huge numbers of
poor people on the planet speak out, are encouraged to do so – and are heard.
For
access to the full text of the United Nations Human Development Report 2003, go
to the Human Development Report
Office website.
Kate
Prendergast is a British freelance researcher and journalist with a
Particular interest in African politics and development.
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