Johannesburg.- Sub-Saharan Africa has achieved the fastest progress among all developing regions in making primary education available to school-age children – improving from 58 per cent enrolment in 1999 to 76 per cent in 2008, the UN reported today.
Moreover, with consistently high economic growth rates over most of the decade, the region has shown some resistance to the effects of the global recession. The percentage of those employed relative to the total population remained steady from 2008 to 2009 at 65 per cent – slightly higher than the ratio at the end of the 1990s, and better than in any other developing region outside of Asia and the Pacific. Declines in output per worker however have contributed to poorer working conditions, worsening the plight of workers in a region where labour productivity was already low preceding the economic crisis.
Some trends in the international environment have favoured growth, such as the easing of external debt and better access to rich-country markets for developing and least developed countries (33 of the region’s 50 countries are classified by the UN as least developed). A surge in mobile phone coverage and broadband Internet access – albeit from very low base lines – has accompanied the economic expansion. But growth has not yet translated into widespread improvements in living standards, and poverty rates remain stubbornly high, according to the United Nations Millennium Development Goals Report 2010, released today by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York, and in regions around the world.
