- Large numbers of Africans continue to struggle to meet their most basic needs. Majorities report going without a cash income (81%), medicine or medical care (66%), and sufficient food (59%), clean water (57%), and cooking fuel (51%) at least once during the previous year.
- As measured by Afrobarometer’s Lived Poverty Index (LPI), material deprivation has climbed to its highest average level of the past 25 years.
- Rates of severe lived poverty, or the experience of “going without” basic necessities on a frequent basis, have also risen to a new high, affecting 24% of citizens.
- Lived poverty varies widely across the continent in extent, intensity, and trajectory. For example, over the past decade, severe material deprivation has fallen in Liberia, Burkina Faso, Togo, Gabon, and Morocco while increasing sharply in Nigeria, Namibia, Mali, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.
The share of humanity who live in conditions of poverty has been falling since at least 1980. Measured as the proportion of people who live on less than $2.15 a day, the figure has declined from above 40% to below 10% – or from 2 billion to fewer than 750 million in absolute terms (Hasell, 2022; Carbone & Ragazzi, 2023; Roser, 2024).
Afrobarometer surveys in the 2000s and 2010s tracked the same downward trends in poverty rates in Africa as measured by the proportions of people who tell interviewers that they go without a basket of basic necessities. Driven by consistent economic growth and expansion of development infrastructure, “lived poverty” fell markedly on the continent between 2005 and 2015 (Mattes, Dulani, & Gyimah-Boadi, 2016).
However, economic growth stagnated in the middle part of the 2010s. And by the end of the decade, African economies were further battered by declining foreign investment and commodity prices, reduced grain imports, and rising domestic prices – trends linked to climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Ero & Mutiga, 2023; Carbone & Ragazzi, 2023). Important political trends were also afoot as levels of political freedom fell in many countries (Freedom House, 2024).
As a result of these dynamics, both the average rate of deprivation and the proportion of people living under conditions of severe lived poverty rose steadily. By Afrobarometer’s eighth round of surveys, conducted in 2019/2021, results showed that Africa had given back all the gains in poverty reduction it had achieved in the previous decade (Mattes & Patel, 2022).
The most recent findings, from Afrobarometer Round 9 surveys – conducted in 39 African countries between October 2021 and June 2023 – confirm the continued expansion of lived poverty. Indeed, the average rate of “going without” is now the highest ever recorded by Afrobarometer since it began its surveys in 1999. Even more troubling is the increased intensity of material deprivation, with one in four Africans reporting conditions of severe lived poverty. Rates of severe lived poverty have increased in 21 of the 34 countries (62%) surveyed in both 2019/2021 and 2021/2023, and in 23 of 33 countries (70%) surveyed in both 2014/2015 and 2021/2023.
Exploratory analyses suggest that increased corruption, but not declining political freedoms, may play a role in resurgent lived poverty. But further research is required to conclusively test the relationship between poverty and long-term political trends on the continent.
