As much as it is agreed that Africa is the second-largest continent in the world, there are yet the least developed countries in Africa where people are measured to be living far below the normal standard of living. Existence, to many of these poverty victims, is crude and unsavory.
Africans are however faced with so many reasons for why a large of number of its countries and their peoples are still grappling with needs and underdevelopment when compared to other places of the world that almost started out like it. Well, there are dangerous reasons, or shall we say factors for that.
One major and most current factor is leadership; after which, war, that is civil war, can be said to be next. These wars are crested by internal conflicts with attention to tribalism, ethnic ego, and so on.
Nonetheless, poverty has really had a deafening grip on many countries in Africa. This has then caused the problem of undernutrition. This includes fetal growth restriction, stunting, wasting and deficiencies of vitamin A and zinc, along with suboptimal breastfeeding; is the underlying cause of death in an estimated 45% of all deaths among children under 5 years of age.
This goes to mean poverty has never stopped to pose fatal problems to many of the listed countries that are still recognized as underdeveloped. No doubt, after war, poor political leadership, poverty is another very powerful indicator of the least developed countries in Africa.
Measures to Identify LDCs
A country is classified among the Least Developed Countries if it meets three criteria:
- Poverty – adjustable criterion based on Gross national income (GNI) per capita averaged over three years. As of 2018, a country must have GNI per capita less than US$1,025 to be included on the list, and over $1,230 to graduate from it.
- Human resource weakness (based on indicators of nutrition, health, education and adult literacy).
- Economic vulnerability (based on instability of agricultural production, instability of exports of goods and services, economic importance of non-traditional activities, merchandise export concentration, handicap of economic smallness, and the percentage of population displaced by natural disasters).
Least Developed Countries in Africa
Having a grasp of what could be the causes for the underdevelopment of the African people, here are the highlights of the least developed countries in Africa which you may need to pay attention to:
- Angola
- Benin
- Burkina Faso
- Burundi
- Central African Republic
- Chad
- Comoros
- Guinea
- Guinea-Bissau
- Lesotho
- São Tomé and Príncipe
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- Senegal
- Sierra Leone
- Somalia
- South Sudan
- Sudan
- Tanzania
- The Gambia
- Togo
- Uganda
- Zambia
- Liberia
- Madagascar
- Malawi
- Mali
- Mauritania
- Mozambique
- Niger
- Rwanda
- D.R. Congo
- Djibouti
- Eritrea
- Ethiopia
