Although North Africa as a whole and a small number of SSA economies have the potential to reach the sub-goal of reducing extreme poverty by half by 2015, the slow pace of progress in the majority of countries indicates that as a continent, Africa is unlikely to reach this goal, given the current trends.

The number of poor people in Africa has actually risen since the 1990s by over 90 million, while the average income of the poor has declined, indicating worsening income distribution within the countries. On the whole, the proportion of people living with insufficient food has declined by only 3 percentage points since the starting point of the Goals in 1990, and hunger still prevails (see Figure 1). This is especially true for rural Africa.

The spectre of hunger continues to haunt most of the African continent. This year, the trauma faced by Niger brought once again to the world’s attention the need to increase the long-term planning capacity of African countries. For many countries south of the Sahara, where most still rely on subsistence agriculture for survival, food security is directly related to the weather. Faced with consecutive years of poor agricultural production and consequent humanitarian crises, governments have had to spend scarce resources in purchasing emergency rations.

Despite slow progress in eliminating hunger and in achieving other MDG targets, 14 SSA countries - among 30 globally - managed to reduce the number of people living with hunger by at least 25 per cent.3 These countries had more stable and growing economies, coupled with investment in interlinked socio-economic policy.