While adequate food and clean water remain daily challenges for millions of Africans, poverty at the household level – “lived poverty” – has declined in two-thirds of countries surveyed by Afrobarometer, newly released survey findings show.

In results published on 21 January 2016, Afrobarometer reports that in 22 of 33 countries across Africa, fewer citizens are going without enough food, clean water, needed medical care, enough fuel for cooking, and a cash income than three years ago. Lived poverty tended to decrease in countries that had made progress in developing basic infrastructure.

The report, titled “Africa’s growth dividend? Lived poverty drops across much of the continent,” is based on interviews in 2014/2015 with more than 52,700 citizens across Africa.

These insights into trends in lived poverty are particularly useful as governments, development partners, and activists forge strategies for achieving Sustainable Development Goals.

Key findings

• Lived poverty remains extensive in Africa. In 2014/2015, more than four in 10 survey respondents say they went without enough food (44%) or clean water (46%) at least once or twice in the year preceding the survey, and large proportions say the same thing with regard to needed medical care (49%), cooking fuel (38%), and a cash income (74%).

• Yet Africa can no longer be characterized as uniformly poor, as levels of lived poverty vary widely across the continent. Lived poverty is highest in Gabon, Togo, and Liberia and lowest in Mauritius, Cape Verde, and Algeria. Indeed, people in Gabon and Togo experienced shortages at approximately 18 times the rate of those in Mauritius, and four times as frequently as residents of Cape Verde and Algeria.

• Respondents in Central and West Africa encounter the most frequent shortages, while North Africans experience the lowest levels of deprivation.

• Compared to Afrobarometer’s Round 5 surveys in 2011/2013, levels of lived poverty declined in 22 of the 33 countries included in both surveys, with very substantial reductions in Cape Verde and Egypt.

• However, lived poverty increased in five countries, most steeply in Mozambique, Benin, and Liberia, and remained stagnant in five others.

• Longer-term, consistent declines in lived poverty have occurred in Zambia, Ghana, and Cape Verde, while sustained increases in lived poverty are reported in Madagascar and Liberia.

• Lived poverty tended to decrease in countries that had made the most progress in building various forms of development infrastructure in local communities, such as tarred/paved roads and sewage systems.

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Afrobarometer

Afrobarometer is a pan-African, non-partisan research network that conducts public attitude surveys on democracy, governance, economic conditions, and related issues across more than 30 countries in Africa. Five rounds of surveys were conducted between 1999 and 2013, and findings from Round 6 surveys (2014/2015) are currently being released. Afrobarometer conducts face-to-face interviews in the language of the respondent’s choice with nationally representative samples that yield country-level results with margins of error of +/-2% (for samples of 2,400) or +/3% (for samples of 1,200) at a 95% confidence level.

Interested readers should watch for additional findings to be released over the coming months (see http://afrobarometer.org/countries/results-round).