The Age of Sustainable Development" gives students an understanding of the key challenges and pathways to sustainable development - that is, economic development that is also socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable.
A Strategy to End Extreme Poverty in Africa
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From the course by Columbia University
The Age of Sustainable Development
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From the lesson
The MDGs and the End of Extreme Poverty
Professor Sachs outlines the pathways for achieving the end of extreme poverty.
Meet the Instructors
Jeffrey Sachs
Director, Earth Institute; Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development; Professor of Health Policy and Management
[MUSIC]
The end of extreme poverty is within reach,
where is that extreme poverty that remains on the planet?
There are roughly 1.2 billion people living below the World Bank's,
poverty line of $1.25 per person, per day.
That number, thankfully, is down sharply from around 1.9 billion in 1990 and
is a share of the population of the still-growing, developing countries.
The poverty rate has fallen by more than half to 20% or so in the year 2010.
So where are those remaining areas of extreme poverty?
The most poverty stricken region of the world is tropical sub-Saharan Africa.
Around 40% of the population of tropical
sub-Saharan Africa remains below the poverty line.
Though, fortunately, that rate is declining now and
has been declining since the start of the new millennium.
The other place with remaining extreme poverty is South Asia and
there the poverty rate is estimated to be
perhaps around 30% of the population.
If you take the total numbers, there are around 400 million
people living in extreme poverty in tropical sub-Saharan Africa.
There are around 400 million people living in extreme poverty in South Asia.
That's about 30% of the total in each case.
Around 20% of the total population, around 250
million people are still in extreme poverty in East Asia,
though East Asia's seen the fastest decline of extreme poverty
because of the rapid growth of China and neighboring countries.
Around 10% of the total population of extreme poor,
that is around 100 million people, are in North Africa and the Middle East.
And the rest, which is around another 100 million
are scattered in the remaining regions of the developing world,
for instance, in Latin America and the Caribbean.
So we know, as we've noticed on many occasions, that the two big areas for
breakthrough are sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Let's take a look at the differential diagnosis for
sub-Saharan Africa and what can be done to help those parts
of sub-Saharan Africa still stuck in extreme poverty
to accelerate the progress out of extreme poverty.
Have a look at the year-to-year growth rates of
the whole world economy, and of sub-Saharan Africa.
This is the change of gross domestic product taken for
the whole sub-Saharan African region, and the gross world product.
Looking at a comparison, and what we can see is some very good news and
that is that the average growth rate in sub-Saharan Africa
of the overall economy picked up significantly after the year 2000.
And indeed sub-Saharan Africa has been achieving economic growth
faster than the average of the world economy.
Sub-Saharan Africa has been growing at around 5% per year.
Now remember the rule of 70, if sub-Saharan Africa
is growing by 5% per year divide 70 by 5 that's 14.
That says that the period that it takes for
the African economy to double in size would be about 14 years.
So something's going right and it's possible even to get faster progress.
If we make a differential diagnosis of Africa's problems,
of course, we see that in those seven big categories where we want
to investigate there are challenges and issues in nearly all of them.
In the physical geography we've seen the problems of disease and
the number of landlocked countries and the distance of populations to the coast.
Which cry out for improved transport infrastructure,
which cry out for improved public health, for
example to combat malaria, a geographically determined disease.
We've seen problems, cultural attitudes,
of very high fertility rates in very poor places.
Meaning that very poor households that have six or seven or
eight children are not able to provide the investments in healthcare,
nutrition and education that their children need to get out of poverty.
Of course, there have been many political failures and
geopolitical failures as well.
A lot of violence, many wars, though fortunately,
many of those wars have come to an end.
So there are places that have been stuck in conflict that have a chance for
development.
Now the peace, if fragile, is present and
providing a new foundation for economic development.
I think it's fair to say that we would want to look at four
categories of investment in Africa for that breakthrough.
The first is in rural development,
especially to spur agricultural development.
The second is in the urban areas.
Africa throughout its history has been predominantly rural,
but it's fast urbanizing, and therefore productive dynamic
cities that can meet the needs of their populations is crucial.
The third category broadly, I would say is the national infrastructure,
the road network, the rail network, the power grids,
the management at large scale of water resources.
Because Africa, historically has been bereft of the vital
infrastructure that it needs for national or regional development.
And the fourth big category that I would bid us to look at is, demography.
And that is the challenge of Africa's still very, very fast population growth.
So let's take a look at some of that.
Turn first to the challenge of agriculture.
As you can see in this map which shows according to
color the productivity of agriculture measured as
the amount of grain produced on each hectare of farmland.
We see that Africa is among the low yield parts of the world.
On average, small holder farmers in
sub-Saharan Africa have gotten a yield that
is a grain output per hectare of farm land,
generally of between half a ton and one ton of grain per hectare.
Now this is not good in international comparative terms.
Many countries have three, or four, or
five tons of grain per hectare of farm land.
And in the most productive grain belts of the world,
those yields can rise even to ten times Africa's yield,
some farms getting ten tons of rice or maize or
wheat per hectare of land.
What's the cause of this?
Well, African farming faces many obstacles,
one is that the farmers traditionally have been too poor to
be able to keep the soils filled with the nutrients needed.
Especially with the nitrogen, potassium, and
phosphorus needed to have high yields of crops.
If you don't feed your crops with decent nutrients, you don't get growth.
And in Africa, the soils have been relatively bereft of the key
nutrients that are needed for farmers to get a high yield.
The next map shows us why.
In all other parts of the world farmers use extensive fertilizers both organic and
chemical to replenish the key nutrients especially the so
called macro-nutrients of nitrogen,
phosphorus and potassium that are taken out with each crop.
When a crop is harvested out go the nutrients.
Somehow those nutrients have to be put back in,
whether in green manures, so called, of organic farms, or
whether through chemical fertilizer, which puts nitrogen back into the soil.
But Africa's peasant farmers have been so poor,
that they have been farming without the advantage of those
added nutrients and that has kept them in a poverty trap.
Because of their poverty, they can't buy the fertilizers that they need,
whether organic or chemical.
Their soils therefore continue to be depleted of key nutrients.
The yields remain low, and year after year,
the farmers get a very, very meager income and
farm families face a tremendous bouts of hunger.
It's not only the fertilizer input its key, other inputs necessary for
high yields include water management fruit irrigation.
And that requires wells and pumps, typically, and good seed varieties.
Where seeds are bred through a variety of means to give high yields.
And African farmers traditionally have lacked the means to
invest in irrigation and to invest in high yield seeds in just the same
way that they've lacked the means to replenish the soil nutrients.
It all adds up to an agricultural poverty trap.
It all tells us that a high priority for Africa to break out of
extreme poverty is to invest in small holder farmers with
government programs that enable even the poorest farmers to
get the inputs that they need whether on credit or as a grant.
So that they can have higher yields, higher income,
and thereby start investing in these crucial inputs.
And then peasant farmers stuck in poverty can become commercial
farmers earning a good income and then using a part of that improved
income to keep making the investments in soil nutrients,
in water management, and in improved seed varieties.
Now to bring this about requires investment in infrastructure.
We've already looked at the difference in the railroad map of Africa and
India, but let's look again.
Remember that in India,
the rail network was a complete grid created by British Imperial rule.
Whereas in Africa, you just have small rail lines not even connected
with each other, typically running from a single diamond mine or
a gold mine, or maybe from a plantation area, to a port.
Well, that's a big problem, even for agriculture.
Because farmers need to be able to buy fertilizer at low costs.
They need to be able to market their grain output and
other output at low transport cost.
And if the transport network doesn't exist to bring the inputs to the farm,
and to bring the produce from the farm to the market,
eats up a tremendous amount of the potential income.
So investing in the basic transport infrastructure,
whether it's the road network or
whether it's the rail network, is also absolutely crucial.
Other aspects of infrastructure are also especially important in the 21st century.
I would say it should be taken as a given that there can
be no economic development on a sustained basis without electrification.
But have a look at this well-known world picture taken by satellite,
by NASA, of the Earth at night which basically tells us where
there are lights on due to an electricity grid.
And you can see the bright lights of the United States,
the bright lights of Europe, the lights of China and Japan,
the lights of the Arabian Peninsula and of India.
But look at sub-Saharan in Africa, its lights out at night, a large part
of rural Africa and that's the predominant part of the African population.
Still lacks access to electricity.
And that means, not only not having lights at night for
children to study and for being able to go about one's activities at home.
But it means the lack of reliable power for
pumping water for irrigation, for refrigeration,
for preservation of agricultural outputs for
processing of food for textiles and apparel and
every other kind of manufacturing activity.
The absence of electrification has been a huge barrier and
another aspect of Africa's poverty trap.
Without electricity, productivity is very low.
Poverty means the inability to invest in the electricity
that could help lift the region out of poverty.
That's the poverty trap once again.
The vicious circle, it has to be broken either by Africa taking
loans to invest in infrastructure, such as electrification.
Or by receiving grants and development assistance that would enable
Africa through the help of richer countries in international organizations.
To be able to undertake those investments,
even if they can't be afforded out of Africa's income itself.
Now, in the 21st century,
another aspect of infrastructure worth mentioning is information technology.
And here, there's good news.
Because these technologies are so powerful, and
the costs of bringing them in have come down so much.
That Africa now has massive access to mobile telephony,
reaching even the most remote villages.
It has several submarine cables of fiber optics surrounding the continent and
bringing increasingly the internet and broadband connectivity to Africa.
Like the rest of the world, Africa is now poised for
a breakthrough by targeted investments in agricultural productivity.
Targeted investments in the core infrastructure of Africa's fast
growing cities.
Targeted investments in the national scale infrastructure such as the road and
rail network or the fiber network,
Africa can make a breakthrough that has eluded it throughout its history.
But there is one final point that is key.
And that is that Africa like the other parts of the developing world
also needs that rapid voluntary reduction of fertility rates,
so that economic growth can keep ahead of a rapidly growing population.
Back in 1950, Africa's population was only
a 180 million people in the sub-Saharan region.
By now that population has increased roughly 5
times to a population of around 900 million.
On the current fertility estimates,
Africa's population would continue to soar.
So that by the end of the 21st century,
Africa’s population would be an astounding 3.8 billion people.
This is too much for Africa’s physical environment for the water and
for the crop yields, especially in an era of climate change.
It's too much for very poor families needing to invest in the health,
in nutrition, and the education of their children.
So in addition to the investments in agriculture, in health,
in education, in roads, in rail, in fiber optics, in electrification.
Africa too, needs to invest in the rapid voluntary reduction of fertility
rates of today's poor households making sure that family planning and
modern contraception are available.
Making sure that young girls aren't forced to drop out of school
because they lack the income to go on but have the opportunity to go
on to a full secondary education and a university education.
So that girls don't end up illiterate, married young, and
starting on another cycle of poverty with six or seven or eight children.
When Africa puts together that fourfold strategy of rural,
urban infrastructure, and demographic transformation.
All within reach, Africa, like the rest of the world,
will break free of the poverty trap, and by 2030, indeed can end extreme poverty.
[MUSIC]
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