The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has estimated that Africa needs to accelerate annual GDP growth to 7% to attain the goal of reducing by half the proportion of people living on less than one dollar a day by 2015.
Africa’s economy as a whole is growing at about 5,5% in 2006, although South Africa and the continent’s oil-rich countries are responsible for most of the growth, the IMF said in its regional economic outlook for Africa, released in Dakar this week.
”The critical thing for the economic poverty goal is growth,” Sanjeev Gupta, assistant director of the Africa Department at the IMF told Irin. ”There is no substitute for higher rates of growth to reduce poverty and achieve all the [Millennium Development Goals] in the long run.”
The IMF report notes that countries which have benefited from multilateral debt relief are using those resources — between 2,5% and 7% of GDP — to boost poverty-reducing investments.
It also finds that Botswana, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Zambia are attracting a growing amount of investor interest, and that remittances from industrialised countries are increasingly important in balancing current accounts. — Irin