Visiting Africa recently at the end of the year in which we have been celebrating 15 years of HATW, I fell to wondering just how things have changed during those years.

Certainly many people are still poorly nourished, have very inadequate water for the most basic of everyday needs, survive on less than 2 dollars a day, and send their children at best to schools where the quality of education is shamefully low. It is also evident that Land Rovers and Peugeots have completely succumbed to Toyota 4x4 dominance in Africa; meanwhile potholes are generally much smaller and less common, especially in the capital cities. Mains electricity is becoming much more widespread if prone to frequent outages (often planned and every evening), and television sets in most villages and shanty towns are now common.

Some of the most dramatic and perhaps surprising rises have been the widespread fanatical and knowledgeable support of UK football – with Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool and Man U shirts everywhere. And the phenomenal uptake of mobile phones (of which all adults seem to have at least one) and their associated paraphernalia such as ubiquitous roadside shacks selling SIM and top-up cards, and offering solar charging.

Of course in our complex world, it is difficult to assess statistics accurately, but I chose to look at some UNICEF figures ('The State of the World’s Children 2009’) in relation to the countries where we work or have worked.

India and Brazil pose particular interpretation problems due to the wide variations in their split societies, and very often the poor appear little changed as the rich have become richer. Some of the more uniform countries in sub-Saharan Africa perhaps show a clearer picture, although again there is much variation in the lives of urban and rural people, both mainly still very poor in comparison with other parts of the world.

Please click on the 'Country stats grid' link below, then take a little time not just to read the table, but to think through the implications of the facts as you digest them…

Note for instance:

• The under-5 mortality rate in Kenya has worsened,
• Almost 10% of the populations of Zambia and Swaziland are orphaned children
• More than half the people living with HIV in the world and 80% of the world’s 15 million AIDS orphans are in Africa
• The average income per person in sub-Saharan Africa today is US $1100 a year (or $3 a day), compared to $43000 ($118 a day) in the UK and $8600 ($23 a day) in the world as a whole.

Whatever happened to making poverty history?

David Steiner