African Development and the Elusiveness of Basic Human Needs: Physical Quality of Life Index and a Case-study of Tanzania

The primary challenge facing sub-Saharan Africa remains fuller development of the region’s vast economic potential. Although the region’s forty-five states are to varying degrees heterogeneous in their structural characteristics, all share the common problem of poverty. This is not to minimise the progress made on a variety of political, social and economic fronts throughout the continent over the past two decades, but rather to emphasise that the current economic situation in Africa is bleak and future development prospects are limited by a complex set of interrelated problems. Included among these are slow overall economic growth, low agricultural productivity, rapid increases in population and acute balance-of-payments and fiscal problems. In fact, of the thirty-one countries judged by the United Nations to be least developed (LLDC) twenty-one are African countries. The facts underlying the present economic crisis can be seen in the various indices set out in Table 10.2.