Four in ten Africans, or over 416 million people, lived on less than $1.90 per day in 2015, according to a new report released by the World Bank on Wednesday. It said extreme poverty will become almost exclusively an African phenomenon by 2030, with 90 percent of the world’s poor projected to live on the continent. The rate of poverty reduction in Africa “slowed substantially” after the collapse in commodity prices that started in 2014. About 46 percent of African countries were in debt distress or considered to be high risk in 2018 compared with 22 percent five years earlier. The Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia regions are expected to see even larger downward revisions in their growth forecasts than in Sub-Saharan Africa for 2019.

Source: The North Africa Journal October 09, 2019 14:03 UTC