Disaster occurrences and impact in Africa

Table 1: Growth in gross domestic product in Africa (percentage) by region and country grouping

2010 2011 2012 2013

Africa 5.0 3.4 4.5 4.8

Central Africa 5.7 5.1 4.9 4.8

Eastern Africa 7.1 5.0 5.1 5.6

North Africa 4.1 0.5 3.1 4.0

Southern Africa 3.5 3.5 4.0 4.4

West Africa 6.9 6.3 5.9 6.4

Oil Exporting Countries 5.3 2.9 4.7 5.0

Oil Importing Countries 4.5 4.1 4.2 4.7

Source: (African Union Commission, 2013)

consistent with the assumption behind the Abuja Treaty, namely, that Africa will solve its major sector policy challenges in a satisfactory man-ner in the next few years and achieve continen-tal integration as well as integration in the world economy.

According to the Study Synthesis, the aver-age growth rate for 53 African countries (GDP-weighted and expressed in U.S. dollars using purchasing power parity (ppp)) is projected to be 6.2 per cent per year between 2010 and 2040, a growth rate that implies that over 30 years, the GDP of African countries will on average be multi-plied six-fold. Thirty-seven countries should exhib-it a growth rate higher than 5 per cent per year on average for the period 2008-40. Twenty-six African countries should record an average growth high-er than the continental avhigh-erage. Eight countries will exhibit an average growth rate of between 5 per cent and 6 per cent per year. At the back of the pack, seven countries are expected to grow at a rate of less than 4 per cent per year (NEPAD, African Union Commission and AfDB, September 2011).

Table 2 depicts projections of Africa’s population figures and the GDP that will be realized with in-creasing population growth. By 2040, with a GDP of over $20 trillion and per capita income averag-ing over 11,000 dollars, more than 50 per cent of Africa’s population will live in urban areas (African Union Commission, 2013).

Notable developments, progress and challenges are reviewed in the African Union Commission

Strategic Plan 2014-2017 (African Union Commission, 2013), particularly with regard to a number of areas such as infrastructure, develop-ment and sustaining human capabilities through increased access to health care and education. A summary of this information can be found below.

Africa continues to make good progress in improv-ing access to education and in promotimprov-ing girls education, with performance closely matching that of India. At the primary level, rapid progress is being made and many African countries are on track to achieve the MDG goal on net enrolment of 95 per cent, with the aggregate net primary enrolment for Africa reported to have increased from 64 per cent in 2000 to 84 per cent in 2009, and most countries (including fragile post-conflict countries) are on track to meet the target by 2015.

The health status of the African population, how-ever, continues to be a source of major concern.

Even though effective public health interventions are available, low coverage and underfunded health systems continue to be serious challenges.

Nevertheless, progress in general has been sig-nificant. According to the African Union report, deaths linked to malaria have fallen by 33 per cent since 2000, while the share of households own-ing at least one mosquito net in Africa has risen from 3 per cent in 2000 to 50 per cent in 2011. The proportion of malaria-exposed people protected by indoor residual spraying for malaria rose from less than 5per cent in 2000 to 11per cent in 2011.

AIDS-related deaths fell by 30 per cent between 2004 and 2010 and more people are living with HIV/AIDs due to access to treatment. Moreover, Table 2: Projections of population and gross domestic product in Africa, 2010-2040

2010 2020 2030 2040

Population (millions) 1,033 1,276 1,524 1,770

Urban population (millions) 413 569 761 986

GDP (2005 ppp $ billions) 3,300 6.010 11,639 20,334

GDP per capita ($) 3,190 4,709 7,636 11,490

Source: African Union Commission, 2013.

annual infections fell by 21 per cent between 1997 and 2010 and HIV rates have fallen in 21 African countries. Deaths from tuberculosis have declined by more than a third since 1990. The existence of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the Abuja Declaration, the Stop TB Partnership, the African Leaders Malaria Alliance and the Roll Back Malaria Partnership points to strong political commitment to these issues.

However, on the negative front, the advent and current rapid spread of the deadly Ebola virus dis-ease epidemic in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone has dramatically exposed the weaknesses and poor state of the public health systems in these countries (World Health Organization (WHO), 2014).

Progress made by Africa with respect to MDG Goal 4 (reduce child mortality) and Goal 5 (improve maternal health) illustrates other key challenges faced by African countries. Out of the 26 countries worldwide with under-five mortality rates above 100 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2010, 24 were in Africa. The average rate of reduction in child mortality in Africa doubled from 1.2per cent in the period 1990-2000 to 2.4 per cent in the pe-riod 2000-2010, with Eritrea, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Niger and United Republic of Tanzania the top performers in that regard. The overall decline, however, is insufficient for Africa to meet the MDG target by 2015.

According to the PIDA report, sub-Saharan Africa lags behind other regions in terms of infrastruc-ture, with a lower density of paved roads, cover-age of telephone landlines and power generation capacity. PIDA was thus initiated as a continental framework by the African Union Commission, the NEPAD Planning and Coordinating Agency and the African Development Bank and adopted by the African Heads of State in January 2012 to ad-dress the deficit in infrastructure development.

Overall, despite the progress registered on the economic front, human development remains a challenge for Africa. Across all dimensions, Africa had the lowest human development index indi-cators of any region. Nevertheless, African coun-tries (Rwanda, Sierra  Leone, Mali, Mozambique, Burundi and Niger) were also among the top ten human development index movers between 2000 and 2010 (African Union Commission, 2013).

In the area of animal health, global eradication of rinderpest has been achieved. Credit and interna-tional recognition for the eradication of the disease has been accorded to the contributions by the African Union Commission as a whole and by the Department of Rural Economy and Agriculture, in particular through its Technical Offices, the Inter-African Bureau for Animal Resources and the Pan African Veterinary Vaccine Centre (African Union Commission, 2013).

Agricultural productivity in Africa remains among the lowest in the world. Average yields in Africa are estimated to be about a quarter of other major developing regions, and have barely increased in the last three decades. Largely due to such an un-derperformance, Africa finds itself as the continent which fails to grow enough food to feed its own citizens. Hunger and poverty are prevalent and an estimated 240 million Africans do not eat well enough to maintain their health and well-being.

Despite huge agricultural potential in terms of available arable lands, biodiversity and natural resource endowments, outstanding challenges in exploiting this potential include boosting in-vestment in agriculture, particularly with regard to allocation from national budgets to meet the 10 per cent target set under CAADP; and the im-plementation of measures to improve agricultural productivity through, policy, institutional and technological initiatives.

The state of rural infrastructure is so poor that, as previously noted, road density in Africa remains low. The average transport cost per kilometre for the distance between Douala and N’Djamena (Cameroon-Chad) is almost three times that of the same distance in the United States of America and twice that in Western Europe.

The African Union Commission Strategy also notes that here has been steady deterioration in the state of the environment in Africa since 1972, despite tremendous strides made in institutional and legal terms. There are significant threats to at-mospheric and fresh water resources, land, coast-land marine environments, forests and woodcoast-lands and biodiversity. Pollution levels have grown as a result of the quest to industrialize and broaden Africa’s manufacturing base, which has not paid much attention to addressing the requirements of environmental impact assessments. While the establishment of environment institutions has grown rapidly, the African Union has acknowl-edged that the implementation of legislative sanctions has not proceeded with the same pace (African Union Commission, 2013). While no par-ticular reasons are given to explain this, corrup-tion can be identified as one of the main causes of the dismal record in enforcement of legislative sanctions. Corruption among public officials can be said to contribute significantly to this state of affairs as such officials, for example, might take bribes to overlook building standards and ignore recommendations of environment impact assess-ments in the approval of infrastructure and other building projects.

There have nevertheless been some areas of progress. One of these is the mainstreaming of gender. The adoption of African Union Gender Policy in 2009, the  declaration by the Assembly of 2010-2020 as the African Women’s Decade, the development of the 10 Year Gender Action Plan and Road Map, the Fund for African Women and the location of the Directorate of Women,

Gender and Development in the Office of the Chairperson of the Commission are all efforts to address gender inequalities and enhance the sta-tus of women. Youth Development has also been promoted through the African Youth Charter and the African Youth Decade 2009-2018 Plan of Action, a programme on youth empowerment through non-formal and technical and vocational education and training. The extent to which these frameworks are being implemented is yet to be determined.

2.1.2 Africa’s development agenda

The African Union has developed a number of strategic frameworks and institutional mecha-nisms to spearhead Africa’s transformation and ensure the region’s greater participation in the global economy. Some of these are briefly out-lined below. The extent to which disaster risk re-duction was mainstreamed in these mechanisms and strategic frameworks is dealt with in later chapters of the report.