|
African continent not on track to meet millennium development goals
|
|
Most countries in sub- Saharan Africa are not on track to meet the millennium development goal of eradicating extreme poverty by 2015, the International Monetary Fund has said in its regional economic outlook for Africa. The IMF has estimated that Africa needs to accelerate annual GDP growth to seven percent if they are to attain the goal of reducing the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day by half.
Africa's economy as a whole is growing at around 5.5 percent in 2006, although South Africa and the continent's oil rich countries are responsible for most of the growth, according to the IMF report.
"The critical thing for the economic poverty goal is growth," Sanjeev Gupta, assistant director of the Africa Department at the IMF, told reporters.
"There is no substitute for higher rates of growth to reduce poverty and achieve all the millennium development goals in the long-run. Africa needs more external resources, and at the moment that means more aid. The IMF strongly favours scaling up aid flows along the lines of the Gleneagles commitments, but so far that has not really occurred," Gupta said.
The Gleneagles commitments were made by G8 members in Scotland in 2005, and included the promise of an extra US $25 billion a year in aid to the African continent before 2010. IMF officials speaking at a ceremony for the report's launch also said Africa needs to improve its terms of trade both with industrialised countries and within the continent itself.
|
