Several major initiatives in the past few years have brought renewed attention and commitment to economic development and food and nutrition security in Africa. The recent economic recovery and the new commitment to change among African leaders and development partners indicate for the first time after decades that Africa is poised to achieve real progress toward food and nutrition security. Sustaining and accelerating growth to reach the poverty reduction and nutrition Millennium Development Goals will require clear strategies to guide future policy and investment decisions. Furthermore, these goals seek to only halve the number of poor and malnourished in the next 10 years, something a number of African countries will fail to do. Progress toward food and nutrition security in Africa, therefore, calls for more than growth and requires a greater focus on human welfare improvement supported by adequate investments in health and nutrition safety nets to protect vulnerable segments of the population.
Poverty and health
Madagascar has called for international aid to help stem a nutritional emergency that has left thousands of children malnourished in the vulnerable south. "Madagascar has sent a message, through the president [recently re-elected Marc Ravalomanana], and called on the international community to help us," Anbinintsoa Raveloharison, Director of the National Nutrition Office (ONN) of the Ministry of Health and Family Planning, told IRIN.
Last month saw the publication of the World Bank’s latest annual Global Economic Prospects report, setting out the Bank’s vision of the global economy until 2030, including its latest projections for poverty. The breathless excitement with which the Bank presents this flight of fancy is quite extraordinary. This document provides an assessment of the latest much-hyped poverty projections from the World Bank.
Several households falling into poverty as a result of HIV/AIDS desperately need support systems. African communities have modified existing safety net mechanisms and pioneered new responses such as home based care programmes, support groups and orphans and vulnerable children initiatives. Safety nets protect people from the worst effects of poverty. They prevent poor households from making hasty decisions to sell productive assets and increase their chances of escaping destitution. But how long can self-resourced initiatives continue to function?
Two developments have led to this report. The first is the growing international awareness that many MDGs will not be reached unless malnutrition is tackled, and that this continued failure of the development community to tackle malnutrition may derail other international efforts in health and in poverty reduction. The second development is the now unequivocal evidence that there are workable solutions to the malnutrition problem and that they are excellent economic investments. The May 2004 Copenhagen Consensus of eminent economists (including several Nobel laureates) concluded that the returns of investing in micronutrient programs are second only to the returns of fighting HIV/AIDS among a lengthy list of ways to meet the world’s development challenges.
World Health Organisation (WHO) together with other key partners have joined forces to develop a new Project "Mental Health and Poverty Project: Improving Mental Health, Reducing Poverty (MHaPP)". The project will undertake an analysis of existing mental health policies in poor countries, provide interventions to assist in the development and implementation of mental health policies in those countries, and evaluate the policy implementation in order to provide new knowledge regarding comprehensive multi-sectoral approaches to breaking the negative cycle of poverty and mental ill-health. The project will be conducted in four African countries: Ghana, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia.
The Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an initiative of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is an attempt at an integrated and bottom-up approach to getting African villages out of the poverty trap. It involves massive injections of capital targeted at, presently, a handful of villages, combining agricultural support with health, infrastructure and education interventions. Taking a critical stance, this paper finds that although these aims are admirable, significant questions remain with regard to scalability and long-term sustainability of the MVP.
The political foundations of poverty are all too often ignored by poverty analysts. This paper presents, from a political-economy perspective, a critique of mainstream poverty analysis. The author argues that the way mainstream research considers poverty separates it from the social processes of the accumulation and distribution of wealth. This serves to depoliticise poverty, as it becomes a kind of a social abnormality, rather than the reality of modern state and market society functions.
This research we combine the strengths of quantitative analysis (representativeness, confidence levels, understanding of correlates and characteristics) and life history analysis (the elaboration of processes that underpin correlations, the understandings that poor people have of their poverty and the critical events that have caused deprivation), to make a genuine attempt at providing thorough insights in to poverty dynamics. Given the relative infancy of applying ‘Q2’ to poverty research, in this way, the paper adopts a joint methodological/themed approach i.e. we explain through the use of examples how the methods were combined to further our knowledge of poverty dynamics before then providing explicit examples of key findings.
Imbawula Trust, a Johannesburg based cultural association says culture has a great role to play in the fight of Africa’s poverty. They said the African continent had great potential to develop if citizens were inspired by their cultural and social customs which are 'vital in the development of peoples mental and social stability'.