The status of human development in Africa as measured by the Human Development Index

It is clear that focusing on economic growth alone as a strategy to combat poverty is ineffective. Income inequality and other forms of inequality are also important determinants of poverty and wellbeing. The tendency to centre the development discourse on increasing national income misses several dimensions of human development, such as having good health and accessing quality education and equitable justice. The limitations of national income as a measure of progress motivated the creation of the Human Development Index (HDI) by UNDP in 1990. This measure was developed to reflect a more people-centred understanding of development. The capabilities approach introduced by Amartya Sen, one of the architects of the HDI, provided the underlying theory of the human development paradigm behind the HDI.⁸ This composite index combines several dimensions of well-being to measure progress. These dimensions are access to knowledge, healthy life and standard of living. Other composite indicators produced by the Human Development Reports (HDRs) have explored gender-based inequities and multidimensional poverty. In the 2010 edition of the HDR, UNDP introduced innovations in the measurement of the HDI and new ways of adjusting the HDI to account for income and gender inequality. Box 4.1 provides the details on the construction of these indices, and Table 4.2 reports the values of HDI and other indices discussed in Box 4.1.

Table 4.2 reports African countries’ indices of human development: Human Development Index (HDI), Inequality-Adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI) and Gender Inequality Index (GII). Information in Table 4.2 also makes it possible to analyse the trends in HDI to assess progress in human development in Africa over time.

The trends of the HDI show that all African countries but Zimbabwe experienced an improvement in their human development between 2000 and 2010. Although African countries are still ranked as having the lowest level of human development relative to other regions, sub‑Saharan Africa made, on average, the most important progress over the period 2000‑10. The regional HDI increased by 23%, followed by South Asia, where the increase was 17% over the same period.

The improvement in Africa from 2000 to 2010 was due to three main factors. First, most African countries experienced higher economic growth in the 2000s relative to the decade before. Given that the level of income is a component of HDI, higher GDP translated into better human development, to some degree. Second, there was genuine progress in the other two dimensions of human development.

Access to knowledge and better health care improved as most countries in Africa increased their investment in social sectors over the last decade. Thus, almost all the countries had higher HDIs in 2010 than in 2000. They were led by Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Burundi, Mali, Niger and Uganda, which each increased their HDI by more than 20% between 2000 and 2010.

Third, to some degree, the strong improvement in human development in Africa from 2000 to 2010 reflects a rebound from the social and economic reversals of the 1990s. Africa is the only region where human development worsened between 1990 and 2000, from an average HDI of 0.354 to 0.319. Between 1990 and 2000, out of 35 countries for which data are available, 11 experienced a decline in their HDI. Political instability and the resulting decline in income, health and education are the most likely factors that explain the decline in human development in some countries. In southern Africa, the decline in human development in the 1990s could be the result of the scourge of HIV/AIDS, which ravaged the region more than anywhere else in Africa before its spread was more or less stabilised in the 2000s. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Lesotho, South Africa, and Zambia, HDIs in 2010 had increased from their values in 2000 but still were lower than in 1990.

As expected, introducing inequality into the calculation of the HDI systematically reduces the values of the traditional index of human development, although the rankings between the two indices are not significantly affected. The difference between HDI and IHDI appears to be more pronounced in countries with large inequalities. Although on average Africa has the lowest indices of both HDI and IHDI, across regions the difference is more pronounced with IHDI, indicating more widespread inequalities in Africa than elsewhere. For example, whereas Africa’s average HDI index is half of the OECD’s, Africa’s IHDI is one‑third of OECD’s IHDI. This is also the case when Africa is compared with other developing regions. Africa’s HDI is two‑thirds of the value for East Asia and the Pacific region. These results confirm findings that inequality has a strong negative effect on human development. A positive interpretation of these findings is that Africa could substantially improve its human development if it addressed inequalities.

The Gender Inequality Index (GII) shows that some African countries perform much better here than on the other dimensions of human development. Out of 169 countries ranked for both HDI and GII, Burundi, one of the poorest countries in the world, moves up 87 places relative to HDI, from 166^th to 79^th. The country’s performance is primarily due to its low adolescent fertility rate and its relatively high proportion of seats held by female members in parliament. Other countries with remarkable progress in gender equality relative to the overall situation of human development include Rwanda, Mauritius and Mozambique. The message from these findings is that important improvements of some dimensions of human development are possible even in very poor countries, as they do not necessarily require financial resources that these countries lack.

Overall, the trends in human development show that Africa is making progress but that it will have to do much more to attain the level of human development enjoyed in other regions. The implication is that human development in Africa will need to improve much faster than in other regions if the continent is to close the current gap. As the cases of improvement of the GII in Burundi, Rwanda, Mauritius and Mozambique show, Africa has the capacity to quickly improve human development to some degree by at least focusing on some dimensions that do not require out-of-reach resources. For example, increasing women’s representation in public structures could be easily done in a relatively short period of time, as the examples of Burundi and Rwanda have demonstrated. It is up to the African countries’ leadership to make this policy choice. It is also expected that the efforts undertaken in several African countries over the last ten years to improve their social sectors by heavily investing in education and health will bear fruit over time. If these efforts are sustained, Africa will increase its chances of closing the gap in human development with other developing regions. Realistically, progress will be relatively slow in some areas. For example, it will take some countries several years to increase their income per capita to levels that will substantially reduce poverty. Reducing inequalities will also take time, considering that this will require balancing out competing interests in African societies.

It is important to note that not just one response to the issues discussed in this chapter will be enough to substantially improve the status of human development in Africa. To be successful, Africa will need to take simultaneous actions on several fronts. For example, economic growth will improve human development if it is inclusive and pro-poor, which means that growth policies will have to encourage a broad-based growth process that benefits as many people as possible. Similarly, investing in social sectors will not produce sustainable human development if these investments are not accompanied by efforts to create more economic opportunities that benefit a large segment of the population. Moreover, some dimensions of human development, for example gender equality, will not improve even if there is high economic growth and declining income inequality unless African governments deliberately choose to promote gender equality. In this regard, in addition to the resources devoted to the improvement of human development, the quality of economic policy will determine the progress African countries will be able to achieve.