tranquilitytotani

[tranquilitytotani]

Eastern and Southern Africa is a new sub-group within sub-Saharan Africa that includes 26 countries.1 According to the latest global poverty database, the region had the world’s highest extreme poverty rate—40.8 per cent in 2018 (Figure 2). Moreover, since 2017 it has been the region with the highest number of people living in  extreme poverty, surpassing South Asia. As of 2018, almost 40 per cent of the world’s extreme poor, or over 262 million people, live in Eastern and Southern Africa. More importantly, not only is this the region with the highest poverty rate and concentration of the extreme poor, but it’s pace of poverty reduction has also been very slow. The extreme poverty rate in Eastern and Southern Africa has declined by only 0.43 percentage points a year since 2010, less than half the global average of 0.93.

Why has poverty reduction in Eastern and Southern Africa been so slow? There are many possible drivers. First, the population growth rate in the region, at 2.6 per cent in 2019, is more than double the world’s population growth rate of 1.2 per cent. Second, its annualized growth rate of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita between 2010 and 2018 was only 0.1 per cent, while all other regions had an annualized growth rate higher than 0.8 per cent. Third, high inequality is a concern for the region. Five of the world’s ten most unequal countries are in this region, and all but two countries had higher Gini coefficients than the global median.2 Fourth, various shocks, including those related to climate, hit countries in the region more frequently than before. For example, since 2016, Malawi has experienced one drought, two cyclones and the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, the Horn of Africa experienced its worst drought in 70 years. The pace of poverty reduction is further exacerbated by surging inflation region-wide. Finally, fragility is an important challenge for this region. It includes multiple fragile States, such as Burundi, Somalia, South Sudan, etc., and refugees from those countries flow into other countries in the region.

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