Human Development in sub-Saharan Africa

摘要

The predictions about the future of sub-Saharan Africa are always so full of gloom that one is tempted, for a change, to start on a more positive note. After all, there are some signs of human progress. Life expectancy at birth has increased by eleven years over the last three decades — from forty years to fifty-one years. Educational enrolment, even if still gender differentiated, has doubled at the primary level during the same period and it has tripled at the tertiary level. The infant mortality rate has nearly halved. Some countries — Botswana, Cape Verde, Lesotho, Mauritius and Swaziland among them — even managed a respectable GDP growth rate of more than 5 percent a year during 1980-92, at a time when most of sub-Saharan Africa was experiencing negative economic growth.