Poverty in Africa

Poverty reduction is the overarching challenge of the African development agenda in the 21st Century. The majority of the African people today continue to live in poverty, as they did for decades in the previous century. The design of effective strategies to fight poverty in Africa has been hampered by lack of credible information on incidence, depth and severity of poverty and by non-availability of methods for policy analysis.

Poverty in Africa: Analytical and Policy Perspectives presents comprehensive information about the extent of poverty in Africa, the institutional constraints to poverty reduction, and the methods for measuring poverty and evaluating alternative anti-poverty measures. This volume offers a range of new tools for monitoring poverty and assessing impacts of anti-poverty programs. Although poverty reduction in Africa has been a daunting task for years, the approaches to poverty analysis presented in this book now make that task much more manageable.

This volume adds value to the existing literature by presenting concepts and methods for poverty analysis in a single source and by documenting them for students, scholars and policy-makers, especially those in Africa where the challenge of poverty reduction is greatest.

Augustin K. Fosu is the Deputy Director, World Institute for Development Economics Research, United Nations University, Helsinki, Finland.
Germano Mwabu is Professor of Economics at the University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya.
Erik Thorbecke is the H.E. Babcock Professor of Economics (Emeritus) and Graduate School and International Professor of Economics at Cornell University, Ithaca USA.