By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 20 2000 (IPS)

The statistics on disease and poverty in Africa may look grim, admits a senior UN official, but there is still reason for encouragement on the economic front.

“The sense of optimism currently prevailing in Africa is not misplaced,” Djibril Diallo, director of the Division of Public Affairs at the UN Development Programme (UNDP), said on Wednesday.

“From a history of negative economic growth, African nations are now achieving record levels of growth,” Diallo told IPS.

The economies of 33 African nations, including Ivory Coast, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Lesotho, Mozambique, Cameroon and Mali, are now achieving new levels of positive growth, he pointed out.

All of these countries have had economic growth rates of more than five percent annually. But if Africa is to reduce poverty by half over the next 15 years, it will need to attain an average growth rate of about seven percent per annum.

Still, Diallo said that in terms of economic performance, Africa has posted an “enviable record in the past few years.”

A UN report released last year said that for the fourth consecutive year, gross domestic product (GDP) in Africa grew faster than population, contrasting markedly with a decade and a half of declining per capita income.

According to the latest available UN statistics, the 3.3 percent GDP growth for the whole of Africa for 1998, compared with 2.9 percent in 1997, was “the highest in the world”. “This growth is a very welcome achievement for Africa,” the report said.

Using continent-wide averages for Africa can, however, be misleading because substantial population and GDP differences exist among the subregions of North Africa, West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa.

The five biggest economies of the continent (South Africa, Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco) account for about 37 percent of the population and 59 percent of GDP.

On the other hand, Africa’s 33 least developed countries (LDCs), described by the UN as the poorest of the world’s poor, have 45 percent of the population and only 17 percent of GDP.

Diallo said that even in the midst of progress, “Africa still remains a continent in great need.”

He said that according to the latest Human Development Report, commissioned by UNDP, only two of the richest 225 people in the world were from Africa.

The two, both white South Africans worth a combined four billion dollars, accounted for only a meagre fraction of the 1.1 trillion dollars owned by this group of the super-rich.

In the annual human development index released last year, the bottom 15 countries were from Africa: countries that lacked basic social services, including health and educational facilities.

“The reason for Africa’s poor showing becomes obvious when some of the data are analysed,” Diallo noted.

Of the 543 million people in Africa, 184 million have no access to safe water, 436 million lack health services, and 510 million people are without basic sanitation.

Diallo said that Africa’s per capita daily calorie intake of 2,236 falls far below the average of 2,571 calories per day for developing nations as a whole.

While average protein consumption is 115 grams per day in France, it is only 32 grams in Mozambique. In Sweden, Switzerland and the US, there are more than 600 telephones lines per 1,000 people, but in Chad, there is one telephone line per 1,000.

On average, he said, sub-Saharan Africa has 12 telephone lines per 1,000 people. Also, while industrial nations have an average of 405 automobiles per 1,000 people, in sub-Saharan Africa, there are only 11 automobiles per 1,00 0.

Meanwhile, the UN Security Council has dedicated the entire month of January to Africa. This is an initiative that has been promoted by US Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council for January.

Addressing the Council last week, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that many parts of Africa “are making impressive progress” despite a rash of political and economic problems facing the beleaguered continent.

“There is no need to give way to Afro-pessimism,” he told delegates, “On the contrary, there could be no better moment for the international community to rally to Africa’s support.”

Annan concurred with Holbrooke in identifying the deadly disease AIDS as the number one problem facing Africa today.

“The impact of AIDS in that region is no less destructive than that of warfare itself. Indeed, by some measures, it is far worse,” he asserted.

Annan said that out of two dozen or more conflicts worldwide, roughly half are in Africa. Of the 48 LDCs, he said, 33 are in Africa.

Fifteen sub-Saharan countries are currently faced with exceptional food emergencies. In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, more than 10 million people’s food supplies are threatened by civil strife. And out of 11 million orphans so far left by the global AIDS epidemic, 90 percent are African children, he said.

But despite these growing problems, Diallo said, Africa still has tremendous potential.

“The fact that many African countries were able to turn around their economies and are now enjoying growth is proof that, with the right policies and support, Africa can set itself on the path to true development,” he said.

The challenge is for the international community to commit itself to giving the continent the support it needs in the new millennium, “which can certainly be the African century,” Diallo added.

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