Two ways to look poverty in the eye and defeat it

Bernard Tabaire

Last week, a BBC Online piece reminded us of one more of Africa’s many contradictions in a stark opening sentence: “Africa, the continent with the fastest growing population, is doing worst when it comes to investing in young people.”

The BBC was reporting last Thursday’s release by the World Bank of its first Human Capital Index, which measures “economic success and gauges how much effort is being put into developing the youth”. The higher the investment in education (not UPE-quality education I suppose) and health, we were reminded, the more productive and higher earning the workforce tends to be.

Globally, Thomson Reuters Foundation added, “more than half of all children born this year will lose half of their potential lifetime earnings due to poverty, poor health and a lack of education...”

Human capital, according to the World Bank, is a person’s knowledge, wellbeing and skills accumulated over a lifetime.
Is there any policymaker in a place like Uganda who doesn’t know this stuff, specifically or broadly?

Well, Chad, an oil producer no less, ranked bottom at number 157, and 21 of the 25 poorest performers are in Africa. Uganda clocks in at number 137, Kenya at 94 and another oil-producer, Nigeria, takes its glorious place at number 152. Seychelles performed best in Africa at number 43. Singapore, South Korea and Japan came on top.

Africa is trying, but even where there are positives, concerns abound. Reuters (the agency, not the foundation), reported on the same Thursday that economies in sub-Saharan Africa will grow at 3.1 per cent this year, up from 2.7 per cent in 2017, and could jump to 3.8 per cent in 2019.

There is a but, however, and it touches on what the World Bank is saying about Africa being able to have the right workforce for the future.
Speedy advances in artificial intelligence and increased automation, which are expected to shape future job markets, may negatively affect sub-Saharan Africa.

“If you are not equipping your labour force for the jobs that have to be created [in the future], you could end up with much lower growth rates. And that’s what we’re worried about,” Mr Abebe Selassie, director of the IMF’s African Department, told Reuters.

(Bonus point: Mr Selassie was IMF’s man in Uganda between 2006 and 2009).
Yet given where things stand, Africa will need to manufacture 20 million new jobs a year through 2035, “more than double the job creation rate of the past five years”.

The job, as they say, is very well cut out for the Big Kahunas in Africa’s Chinese-built presidential palaces and gleaming office buildings.

Africa’s leaders, all of them, will need to show urgency. The pace of progress is weighed down not so much by conflict as was the case for many years, but corruption and poor performance in the public sector.

If you are an ardent East African, you are probably familiar with mega corruption scandals especially in Uganda and Kenya.

Look a little farther south, and news from Zambia suggests that thieving in government is alive there too. The government in Lusaka recently suspended more than 80 education ministry officials for reportedly embezzling $1.6 million of donor money.

Some Asian countries may have developed despite high-levels of public-sector corruption as some commentators in Uganda glibly tell us, but there is no certainty the same will follow in Kenya or Zambia or Uganda. The times are different.

Besides, if there is no merit in the economic case, we can always make a compelling moral one. If you cream off money for the repair of a key bridge and a shoddy job is done, you surely will have blood on your hands when a bus full of school children plunges into the fast-moving water below. What a way to live!

In Kenya this week, some 56 people perished when their bus crashed in Kericho. The bus was overloaded, it was speeding, it did not have a speed governor, had no licence to be driven at night, and was probably not insured.

How on earth did the owners and the police allow such a bus on the road? We can guess: greed, corruption, negligence, and incompetence.
There is always some cost to cutting so many corners repeatedly. The cost could be of the ultimate type as those bus passengers “found out”.

Maybe if we get to do the right thing per the World Bank study, artificial intelligence will ensure no corner-cutting and a few miserable lives may be saved.

Bernard Tabaire is a media trainer and commentator on public affairs based in Kampala.
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Twitter:@btabaire