Based on the standard US$1 per day threshold, the incidence of poverty in Africa has worsened over recent decades from 42.6 percent of the sub-Saharan African population in 1980 to 45.7 percent in 2003. This decline happened despite significant improvement in GDP growth and in economic management.

To discuss the issue, as well as the impact of globalisation on poverty, the Economic and Social Policy Division of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ESPD/ECA) is hosting two workshops on 14-15 December in Nairobi, Kenya for African and international poverty specialists.

Scheduled to attend are officials from planning/development ministries, national development councils, and national statistical offices in East and Southern Africa, as well as representatives of the ECA and its sub-regional offices in Kigali, Rwanda, and Lusaka, Zambia.

Entitled “Poverty Measuring and Monitoring,” the first workshop seeks to inform policymakers of issues and techniques in the measurement and monitoring of poverty in Member States.

Specialists on poverty mapping and measuring will present their findings and methodologies, and will discuss the most recent attempts made by policy makers and advisers to address issues of poverty and its measurement.

In a second workshop, specialists convened by the ECA will discuss the impact of globalisation on the labour market as being crucial to the alleviation of poverty. By engaging with the global economy, developing countries can benefit from trade, foreign investment and other flows, resulting in higher economic growth and job creation, and ultimately, a reduction in poverty.

“Most of the time, poverty is measured in terms of its incidence and sometimes depth and intensity,” said economist and author of several papers on the inequality/growth nexus, Augustin Fosu, the director of ECA/ESPD. “However,” he said, “In Africa, poverty statistics say nothing about the persistence of poverty in households.”

According to Dr Fosu, there are large looming questions in the background of poverty studies: Do households remain trapped in poverty over long periods of time, even over generations? Are the same types of households in identical regions always in poverty? Do households fluctuate in and out of material hardship? What are the sources of these transitions/changes in employment status, family structure, agricultural conditions, war/conflict, health problems and other crises that African households have to endure?

“Progress in poverty reduction is partly determined by the initial level of poverty,” explained Dr Fosu. “But also important is the dynamic structure of the initial poverty: What proportion of the initial poverty condition was transitory? Are coping strategies of income losses further exacerbating chronic poverty? What were the prevailing economic conditions and how did these conditions differ across households and regions?” he added.

These issues need to be addressed as an additional dimension of poverty, in order to enhance the design of effective long-term poverty reduction policies, he said.

“Tackling chronic poverty should be a priority for governments because of the long-term effects, particularly on children, persistent low income has and the associated outcomes of malnutrition and poor education,” said Adrian Gauci, an economist at the ECA.

But the estimation of the determinants of poverty dynamics requires panel data, where information on income and other socio-economic variables is collected repeatedly over time on the same households.

Another issue that should also be considered is the multi-dimensionality of poverty recognizing the importance of other aspects of deprivation besides income such as: health, education, and housing. Policymakers need to consider both monetary and non-monetary indicators in order to capture the different dimensions of poverty. To what extent do these different dimensions re-enforce each other, and what role does mutual re-enforcement play in explaining poverty persistence?

Another enormous challenge in poverty reduction is the phenomena of globalization. Albeit important for a country''s overall economic growth, globalization can also result in unemployment, as workers from previously protected industries are made redundant. This can exacerbate poverty as witnessed in countries such as Zambia after they had liberalized trade in the early 1990s.
In fact, the biggest challenge for Africa today and the future is how to convert the process of globalization into more opportunities for its people. This requires better measurement and monitoring of poverty in terms of outcomes in the labour market.