The peril of international development in local context and the misfit of poverty analysis in Africa

Abstract

Poverty is a global phenomenon and is observed to be the greatest socioeconomic challenge of the twenty-first century, plaguing both developing and developed countries. For this purpose, several international poverty reduction strategies have been proposed and adopted in Africa. The rate and levels of poverty on the African continent, with particular attention given to the Sub-Saharan Africa is on the rise. The questions addressed in this paper are threefold: What are the challenges of international development strategies for poverty alleviation in local context? What are the contours to poverty measurement and conceptualization globally and in South Africa? How do we understand the unidimensional analysis of poverty and how it affects poverty reduction strategies? It uses existing statistics and research data from Statistics South Africa and other indexes cushioned with over 150 research papers to generate data for the paper. Theme and narrative analysis were used to analyse the data for this paper. In conclusion, the paper contends that the development initiatives implemented in most developing countries, especially in Africa, were unsuitable, where it neither took cognizance of structures, culture nor the dynamics of poverty on the African continent. Consequently, it complicated and compounded the woes of those in poverty in Africa. This is because the policies and programmes adopted tend to favour the West and its allies, the East and its allies, China and its allies, and local bourgeoisie and the elite, at the expense of the local people and those in poverty on the African continent.

Keywords

• poverty
• poverty reduction
• saps
• prsps
• mdgs