African Poverty Statistics Will Never Tell The Whole Story!

Clearly Africa is a land of extreme poverty. The media has always and continues to portray the African continent as a destitute and hopeless one. In fact the images of this once great nation are commonly used by charity organizations to illustrate the characteristics of human want and suffering. But precisely, how poor are African countries? And what does the accumulated data that the Western World Statistics Organizations really show?

Superficially many economists may argue that African Poverty Statistics can clearly highlight the state of their poverty. However, this may not be necessarily the truth! Structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are established based on the assumption that progress can be measured in terms of movements in the Gross National Product or the Gross Domestic Product. Governments internationally therefore estimate their performance based on changes in economic growth rates.

According to this set guideline established by international organizations, African nations are several decades behind developed nations. In 1996, the average of GNP per capita in the industrialized world was $27,086, compared with $528 in Africa. This therefore illustrates that industrialized countries are roughly 51 times wealthier than African nations. So that at an annual growth rate of a mere three percent it would take Africa roughly120 years to reach today's level of wealth of the West. Of course, western nations are unlikely to stand still while this happens. Thus it seems that African societies striving to catch up with the west have an almost impossible task ahead of them.

For developed countries, almost every activity has been commercialized. Take for example, the national accounts of any western nation; these may include payments for personal beauty care, which for the United States is an amazing $60 billion a year. It is important to note that such an item would hardly feature in the accounts of African nations. However, this does not mean that African nationals do not enjoy 'beauty' treatments - it's simply means that these activities are not as commercialized as in the Western Nations. In 1996 people in Britain spent some $33 billion on beer, wine and spirits, an amount that is larger than the GDP of most African countries. On the other hand the consumption of local spirits and other indigenous alcoholic brews in African countries is not incorporated in national accounts.

The standards that we use to justify the economic prowess of the world may not necessarily take into account the true essence of their economic strengths, as clearly is the case in Africa. GDP statistics of African nations and many other developing nations do not adequately reflect their cultural output, whilst cultural output forms a significant proportion of the GDP of western nations.

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