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Poverty levels in East Africa diminishing rapidly – more join the new global “middle class”
African middle class family in Lusaka, Zambia. PHOTO/Georgina Smith/The Guardian
A raft of trickle-down economic policies adopted by East African governments to fight poverty seems to be bearing fruit with new global data showing that poverty levels in the region have significantly dropped.
The UN said in the Human Development Report (HDR) 2013 released last week that poverty reduction drivers in developing countries exceeded expectations, helping uplift hundreds of millions of the poor into a new “global middle class.”
Another report by Oxford University’s Poverty and Human Development Initiative ranked two East African countries, mainly Tanzania and Rwanda, among the “star performers” in fighting poverty worldwide.
The Oxford University think tank reckons the two East African countries could, if the current trend continues, eradicate absolute poverty within the current generation.
“The world is witnessing a epochal ‘global rebalancing’ with higher growth in at least 40 poor countries helping lift hundreds of millions out of poverty and into a new ‘global middle class.’ Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast,” said the UN Human Development Report. The report also cited trade as a key factor in improving conditions in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone.
The Oxford report, which is based on the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), measures nutrition, education, sanitation and traditional methods such as gross domestic product (GDP).
It identifies Rwanda, Nepal and Bangladesh as the most rapidly improving countries of a 22-country study, closely followed by Ghana, Tanzania, Cambodia and Bolivia. It predicts that the “star performers” could eradicate acute poverty in 20 years.
