Poverty in a Rising Africa

TLDR: The first part of a two-part volume on poverty in Africa as mentioned in this paper examines progress over the past two decades along both monetary and non-monetary dimensions of poverty, assessing progress in education and health, the extent to which people are free from violence, and the joint occurrence of various types of deprivation.

Abstract: This report is the first of a two-part volume on poverty in Africa. This study documents the data challenges and revisits the core broad facts about poverty in Africa; the second report will explore ways to accelerate its reduction. The report takes a broad, multidimensional view of poverty, assessing progress over the past two decades along both monetary and nonmonetary dimensions. The dearth of comparable, good-quality household consumption surveys makes assessing monetary poverty especially challenging. The report scrutinizes the data used to assess monetary poverty in the region and explores how adjustments for data issues affect poverty trends. At the same time, the remarkable expansion of standardized household surveys on nonmonetary dimensions of well-being, including opinions and perceptions, opens up new opportunities. The report examines progress in education and health, the extent to which people are free from violence and able to shape their lives, and the joint occurrence of various types of deprivation. It also reviews the distributional aspects of poverty,by studying various dimensions of inequality. To shed light on Africa’s diversity, the report examines differences in performance across countries, by location, and by gender. Countries are characterized along four dimensions that have been shown to affect growth and poverty: resource richness, fragility, landlockedness and income status. To conclude, a portion of inequality in Africa can be attributed to inequality of opportunity, circumstances at birth that are major determinants of one’s poverty status as an adult.