Fighting poverty in the Sahel: perhaps, but how?

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted by the United Nations in 2000, and then the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, placed the fight against poverty at the very top of the purposes of development. Is that priority relevant everywhere, and in particular in West Africa and the Sahel? The question deserves to be asked — not because poverty there would be a statistical invention or an imported notion, but because African public debate on development is often clouded by three confusions.

The first is the recurring quarrel over metrics. Gross domestic product (GDP), sometimes presented as a "Western aggregate", is said to be inherently incapable of capturing African wealth, notably because it measures the informal sector poorly. The criticism contains a share of truth: GDP measures neither well-being, nor the distribution of income, nor the whole range of non-market activities, and African statistical systems often remain incomplete. But it becomes misleading when it suggests that national accountants ignore the informal sector by definition, or that no other indicator exists. Since the work of Amartya Sen, the creation of the Human Development Index (HDI), multidimensional measures of poverty and living-conditions surveys, no serious economist confuses GDP with an exhaustive measure of development.

The second confusion consists in sliding the word "poverty" from its analytical meaning — insufficient resources or deprivations that prevent a decent life — towards a humiliating or moral one. Acknowledging the existence of poverty in Africa would then be an insult to the continent. Some go so far as to claim that it was invented by the World Bank, setting against deprivation statistics the long list of minerals present in the African subsoil. Yet the geological wealth of a territory says nothing, on its own, about its population's access to water, food, education, health, decent housing or productive employment. A country can be rich in natural resources and still count a majority of poor citizens.

The third confusion rests on the sarcasm that "you can't eat growth". The formula is a useful reminder that a rise in GDP does not automatically improve everyone's life. It becomes an obstacle to reflection, however, when it is used to deny any relationship between production, incomes, employment, public revenue and poverty reduction. Growth is not eaten directly; but without a sustained increase in productivity and in the wealth produced, it becomes difficult to finance education, health, infrastructure or social protection.

It is therefore useful to return briefly to the instruments of measurement, to the evolution of development thinking, and to the reasons why the fight against poverty constitutes, in the Sahel, not a minimalist conception but a particularly ambitious demand for economic, social and institutional transformation.

I. What GDP measures — and what it does not

GDP measures the monetary value of final goods and services produced on a country's territory over a given period. It can be computed through three consistent approaches: by production, summing value added; by income, summing the remuneration of labour and capital plus taxes net of subsidies; or by expenditure, following the identity: consumption + investment + public spending + exports – imports.

The idea of measuring a nation's income is an old one. In the seventeenth century, William Petty attempted to assess England's wealth and income, notably in order to gauge its fiscal and military capacity. In the eighteenth century, François Quesnay's Tableau économique depicted the flows of production and income between social groups. Modern measurement of national income, however, developed during the Great Depression and the Second World War. In the United States, Simon Kuznets built systematic estimates of national income in the 1930s. In the United Kingdom, under the influence of John Maynard Keynes, James Meade and above all Richard Stone devised an integrated system linking production, income, consumption, saving and investment.

After the Second World War, the challenge was to make statistics comparable. In 1953 the United Nations published the first System of National Accounts, revised in 1968, 1993, 2008 and, more recently, in 2025. That framework defines the production boundary, the transactions of households, firms and government, capital formation and relations with the rest of the world. GDP at current prices measures the value of output at the year's prices; real GDP, or GDP at constant prices, seeks to separate changes in volumes from changes in prices.

To compare countries, converting GDP at market exchange rates is insufficient: those rates fluctuate and do not necessarily reflect differences in domestic prices. Purchasing power parities (PPPs), whose modern formulation owes much to Gustav Cassel, are conversion rates computed from the prices of comparable baskets of goods and services. They allow the volumes produced to be expressed in a common unit, the "international dollar". GDP in PPP terms is therefore more appropriate for comparing material living standards; GDP converted at market exchange rates remains more relevant for assessing import capacity, external debt service or international financial weight. PPPs do not simply "bring" every country back to United States prices: they result from multilateral comparisons organised notably within the International Comparison Program.

GDP remains an indicator of economic activity, not an exhaustive measure of well-being. It says nothing directly about the distribution of income, poverty, the quality of public services, the environment, security, freedoms or unpaid domestic work. Kuznets himself warned against equating national income with welfare. The right answer to those limits, however, is not to abandon GDP but to complement it with indicators of income per capita, distribution, consumption, health, education, employment and freedoms.

The informal sector: a measurement difficulty, not a conceptual exclusion

The argument most often raised against African GDP concerns the size of the informal sector. The notion was popularised by Keith Hart on the basis of his research in Accra, then institutionalised by the International Labour Organization. It designates production units that are often small, barely separated from the household, unregistered or not keeping complete accounts. Informal employment is a broader notion: it includes workers without legal or social protection, including in some formal firms.

Contrary to a widespread belief, the System of National Accounts requires all market production to be included in GDP, whether formal or informal. The street vendor, the artisan working at home, the unregistered transporter or the farmer producing for the market therefore contribute, in principle, to value added. The problem is that of the non-observed economy: activities poorly captured by surveys, censuses and administrative records. Statisticians must estimate them from household and micro-enterprise surveys, employment data, commodity flows or technical coefficients.

Morten Jerven showed, in Poor Numbers (2013), how fragile such estimates can be when statistical institutes have few resources, use outdated base years or cover new sectors poorly. The spectacular GDP revisions in several African countries did not reveal wealth that had appeared overnight: they incorporated new surveys, new products and weights more consistent with the actual structure of the economy. They are a reminder that GDP is a revisable estimate.

Three conclusions follow. First, it would be wrong to add an outside estimate of the informal sector mechanically to official GDP: part of the informal economy is already counted, and double counting would be the risk. Second, the uncertainty bears less on the existence of the informal sector than on its value added, its productivity and its evolution. Third, improving measurement requires regular economic censuses, integrated household-enterprise surveys, updated base years and sustained funding for national statistical institutes.

II. From GDP to human development

Since the first UNDP Human Development Report, published in 1990 at the initiative of Mahbub ul Haq and strongly inspired by Amartya Sen, development is no longer seriously reduced to the accumulation of wealth. For Sen, it must be understood as a process of expanding the real freedoms people enjoy to lead the lives they have reason to value. Income remains essential, but as a means: it is progress only if it genuinely broadens the capabilities to live long and in good health, to be educated, to work, to take part in collective life and to escape hunger, destitution or oppression.

Sen distinguishes the constitutive from the instrumental value of freedoms. Being able to speak, to be treated, to learn or to take part in public decisions is part of the very definition of development. But these freedoms also have an instrumental function: a free press, public debate, economic opportunities, social services, transparency and protection against shocks reinforce one another and compel rulers to respond more fully to the needs of the population.

Democracy thus has intrinsic, instrumental and constructive value. It guarantees neither growth nor good policies, but it allows citizens to take part in decisions, to demand accountability and to define publicly what they regard as a need or an injustice. The HDI translates part of this approach by combining three dimensions: longevity, education and standard of living. It does not replace GDP; it is a reminder that the wealth produced is only one of the means of development.

III. How the fight against poverty became a development project

Making poverty reduction a central purpose does not mean neglecting growth, productive transformation or institutions. It means that their value must be assessed against their capacity to reduce deprivation. In countries with low income per capita, growth is indispensable because the resources available for redistribution are limited. But it is not sufficient: an economy can grow without creating enough jobs, without improving public services and without raising the incomes of the poorest groups at the same pace.

In the first post-war decades, development was largely equated with capital accumulation, industrialisation and growth of the national product. Insufficient saving seemed to explain the backwardness of poor countries; foreign aid was to fill the investment gap. That is how the target of devoting 0.7% of rich countries' national income to official development assistance emerged, popularised in the late 1960s, notably by the Pearson Commission, before being endorsed by the United Nations.

The experience of the 1960s and 1970s showed, however, that growth could coexist with mass poverty, underemployment and sharp inequalities. The basic-needs approach then placed food, health, education, housing, water and employment at the centre of development policy. Under Robert McNamara, the World Bank paid greater attention to rural poverty and social services; the ILO made employment and the satisfaction of basic needs a major axis of its thinking.

The debt crisis and the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s brought macroeconomic stabilisation and market reforms back to the fore. But the social costs of adjustment led international institutions to reintroduce poverty explicitly. The publication, in 1987, of Adjustment with a Human Face by G. A. Cornia, Richard Jolly and Frances Stewart, under the aegis of UNICEF, contributed to that decisive turning point by highlighting the social costs of structural adjustment programmes and the need to protect the most vulnerable populations. The World Development Report 1990 proposed a strategy combining labour-intensive growth, access to education and health, and safety nets. The 2000-2001 report, Attacking Poverty, broadened the definition to the dimensions of vulnerability, powerlessness and voicelessness.

From 1999 onwards, Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers were to organise the policies of low-income countries, aid and debt relief around a national diagnosis. Their ownership was uneven, but they institutionalised poverty reduction as an explicit objective. The MDGs, adopted in 2000, set quantified targets for extreme poverty, hunger, education, health, gender equality and water. The SDGs, adopted in 2015, broadened the ambition to poverty "in all its forms", to social protection, essential services, resilience and inequalities.

IV. Understanding poverty in order to fight it better

Three economic contributions help summarise how knowledge has evolved.

Angus Deaton showed the importance of starting from households' living conditions rather than inferring their well-being from macroeconomic aggregates alone. In agricultural or informal economies, consumption is often better measured than income, which is irregular and under-reported. Household surveys make it possible to study food, health, own consumption and price differences. They also reveal how sensitive estimates are to poverty lines, household composition and data quality. Deaton finally insists on the role of institutions: aid can produce benefits, but it can also bypass the state and weaken the relationship of accountability between rulers and citizens.

François Bourguignon clarified the relationship between growth, inequality and poverty. The evolution of poverty depends both on the change in average income and on its distribution. In a highly unequal society, the poor are far from average income; identical growth therefore reduces poverty less. The relevant question is not only "how much did the economy grow?", but also "in which sectors did that growth occur, what jobs were created and who received the additional income?" Growth and redistribution are not mutually exclusive alternatives: rapid and lasting poverty reduction generally requires both.

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer shifted the analysis towards the concrete obstacles poor households face and towards the causal evaluation of policies. Randomised experiments made it possible to test interventions in education, health, credit, agriculture or social transfers. They showed that seemingly modest constraints — the cost of travel, poor information, an unsuitable schedule or insufficient service quality — can prevent a programme from being used. This approach does not constitute a complete theory of structural transformation, of the state or of power relations; it complements macroeconomic and institutional analysis by forcing policies to account for their actual results.

These bodies of work lead to an integrated conception. Productive growth remains necessary; its effect depends on its structure and its distribution; poverty must be measured from living conditions; and public policies, financed by aid, loans or the country's own fiscal resources, must be evaluated rather than merely announced. Development as the fight against poverty thus combines growth, reduced inequality, expanded human capabilities, protection against shocks and the transformation of the institutions that reproduce deprivation.

V. Why place the fight against poverty at the heart of development in the Sahel?

This conception is particularly relevant in the Sahel, where growth translates only with difficulty into a sufficiently rapid and sufficiently broad improvement in living conditions. The question is not merely to produce more, but whether the additional output raises income per capita, creates productive jobs, improves agriculture and enables the state to widen access to essential services. Five constraints accumulate and must be taken into account: rapid population growth, low initial income, incomplete structural transformation, exposure to shocks and the limited capacity of public policy.

A demography that continually raises the level of effort required

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region where population is growing fastest. That average, however, conceals wide gaps. Several countries of the central Sahel long recorded rates close to or above 3% a year. Niger is the most extreme case: around 2019 its population was growing by roughly 3.8% a year and fertility remained close to seven children per woman. Mali, Burkina Faso and Chad are also at high levels, whereas Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire or Senegal are engaged in a more advanced demographic transition.

When population rises by 3% and GDP grows by 5%, average income per capita increases by only about 2%. At the same time, the state must accommodate more children every year in schools and health centres. A young population can become an asset if it is educated, healthy and employed in productive activities. But when falling mortality is not accompanied by a sufficiently rapid decline in fertility, investment per child and per inhabitant becomes harder. The demographic dividend then remains a possibility, not an automatic reality.

When the poverty rate falls but the number of poor people rises

Demographic dynamics explain how a decline in the poverty rate can coexist with an increase in the number of poor people. In Niger, the incidence of national poverty declined between the mid-2000s and 2014, but population growth raised the absolute number of the poor. More recently, the national rate remained close to 41% between 2018 and 2021; with annual population growth of 3.7%, roughly one million additional people joined the poor population according to the World Bank.

The phenomenon is essential for public policy. A government can announce a fall in the percentage of the poor while the number of poor children to be schooled, vulnerable households to be supported and patients without access to care keeps rising. Strategy must therefore target growth per capita, the demographic transition, productivity and the distribution of gains simultaneously.

Growth that is less effective against poverty than in other regions

Recent World Bank work confirms that growth in GDP per capita is transmitted less strongly to poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the developing world. In the international sample studied, a 1% rise in GDP per capita is associated on average with a fall of about 2.5% in the poverty rate; the African elasticity is markedly lower, largely because GDP growth translates less well into growth of household consumption.

Sub-Saharan Africa has thus become the epicentre of global extreme poverty. In 2024 it accounted for roughly 16% of the world's population but 67% of people living in extreme poverty. That concentration does not result from a total absence of growth: the poverty rate has declined over the long run, but too slowly to offset population growth and successive crises.

The comparison with several Asian economies is illuminating. In China, Vietnam or Bangladesh, growth was accompanied by a transformation of agriculture, industrial or export development and a decline in fertility. Millions of workers moved from very low-productivity activities to more productive jobs. In much of the Sahel, growth comes rather from extractive industries, construction, low-productivity services or rain-dependent agriculture. A gold mine or an oil project can raise GDP sharply with few direct jobs; a good agricultural season reduces poverty, but its gains can be wiped out by the next drought.

Economic structures that diffuse gains poorly

A large share of the Sahelian labour force remains employed in low-productivity agriculture. Irrigation is limited, yields are low, and access to inputs, finance and markets remains difficult. Households live close to the poverty line and can fall back below it after a bad harvest, an illness, a displacement or a price surge.

Urbanisation does not guarantee a strong rise in productivity. Many migrants join petty trade, transport, personal services or informal family businesses. These activities are indispensable, but they have little capital, create few wage jobs and offer limited social protection. Industrialisation remains weak, particularly in landlocked countries. Yet manufacturing has historically made it possible to absorb relatively low-skilled workers, to foster learning and to raise productivity rapidly.

Inequalities in access to assets aggravate the problem: irrigated land, credit, education, health, commercial networks, infrastructure and political connections. Growth concentrated in capital cities or extractive enclaves benefits little the households that cannot take part in it. François Bourguignon's analysis applies fully: the effect of growth depends on its composition and on the initial distribution of incomes and assets.

Mali and Niger: two forms of weak transmission

Mali illustrates growth whose benefits spread poorly because of territorial gaps, the weight of gold in exports, the weak creation of productive jobs and, since 2012, insecurity. Gold brings foreign exchange and revenue, but few direct jobs. Cotton supports many households, but remains vulnerable to prices, climate and input costs. Conflicts have destroyed assets, disrupted markets and reduced access to services.

Niger presents a complementary difficulty. When household consumption rises, poverty can decline appreciably; but low growth per capita, demography, climate shocks and insecurity quickly neutralise those gains. One must therefore distinguish the statistical elasticity of poverty to a rise in income from the economy's actual capacity to generate that rise durably for a rapidly growing population.

What African comparators show

There is no simple opposition between the Sahel and southern Africa. South Africa is a reminder that a richer and more formal economy can retain weak transmission from growth to poverty when inequalities are extreme. The real contrast sets economies in which growth creates jobs, raises agricultural incomes and finances effective transfers against those where it remains concentrated in capital-intensive sectors or favoured groups.

Botswana shows that an extractive rent can support development when the state is relatively competent, the rules stable and the population small. Diamond revenues financed infrastructure and social services. But mining dependence, unemployment and inequality have progressively reduced the effectiveness of growth against poverty. The Botswanan case therefore teaches as much about the possibility of good rent management as about its limits.

Ethiopia followed a different trajectory. During the 2000s, agricultural growth, rural infrastructure and the expansion of social services contributed to a sharp fall in poverty. But conflicts, droughts and inflation subsequently weakened those gains. The experience underlines the importance of a state capable of investing at scale, but also the vulnerability of progress when political institutions do not allow conflicts to be resolved peacefully.

Kenya offers a third comparator, based on a more diversified economy, commercial agriculture, private initiative and innovation. Between 2005-2006 and 2015-2016, the national poverty rate fell from 36.5% to 27.0% according to the revised series of the World Bank and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics. The expansion of M-Pesa improved financial inclusion and resilience; a study by Tavneet Suri and William Jack estimates that it lifted roughly 194,000 households, nearly 2% of Kenyan households, out of extreme poverty. But the majority of new jobs remain informal, territorial disparities are wide, and financial innovation replaces neither industrialisation nor improvements in agricultural yields.

Is Rwanda replicable in the Sahel?

Rwanda is often presented as the example of a "developmental authoritarianism" in which Paul Kagame's highly personalised leadership, administrative discipline, target-setting and managerial governance of the state are said to have produced a near-miracle. The results are real: rapid reconstruction after the 1994 genocide, improved security, progress in health and education, sustained growth and falling poverty. According to the new methodology of the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda, the poverty rate stood at 27.4% in 2023-2024; a "backcast" indicates that it would have been 39.8% in 2016-2017 under the same method.

These achievements cannot, however, be attributed to Kagame's charisma alone. They must be set within the exceptional conditions of a country to be rebuilt after extreme destruction, which benefited from substantial external support, a small and dense territory, a highly centralised state and remarkable administrative capacity. Agriculture played a major role in the first phase of poverty reduction. The model nonetheless still faces rural poverty, land pressure, insufficient job creation and controversies about the comparability of statistics. Above all, the concentration of power and the repression of the opposition, the media and civil society raise the question of the sustainability of a development deprived of autonomous corrective mechanisms. Rwanda is less proof that authoritarianism produces development than a singular case in which a cohesive elite wagered on reconstruction and performance, under conditions hardly transposable to the Sahel and at the price of severely restricted pluralism.

Policies that still struggle to change scale

Sahelian states and their partners have not ignored poverty. Programmes exist for school feeding, free health care, cash transfers, public works, agricultural subsidies and productive inclusion. The problem lies in their coverage, their continuity and their institutionalisation. Many depend on external projects, remain limited to certain areas or are interrupted by budgetary and security crises. Weak civil registration and social registries complicate the identification of beneficiaries; informality limits contributory mechanisms; conflicts prevent the administration from reaching the most vulnerable populations.

International experiences that have become emblematic — Bolsa Família in Brazil, the expansion of manufacturing in Bangladesh, M-Pesa in Kenya — combined an identifiable innovation, broad coverage and measurable results. The Sahel does not merely lack "good ideas"; it often lacks states able to finance them, scale them up, coordinate them and sustain them long enough.

A normative purpose and a demand for transformation

Making the fight against poverty the heart of development in the Sahel therefore does not amount to substituting social transfers for growth. It amounts to submitting growth to a more demanding test: does it raise income per capita sufficiently? Does it create jobs accessible to young people and to women? Does it increase the productivity of agriculture? Does it finance education, health and social protection? Does it reduce the absolute number of the poor, and not only their proportion?

A coherent strategy must act on four fronts at once. It first presupposes growth faster than that of the population and based on job-creating activities. It then requires a demographic transition resting on girls' education, reproductive health and women's economic autonomy. It calls for policies enabling households to leave very low-productivity activities for more remunerative ones: irrigated agriculture, agro-processing, light industry, modern services and infrastructure. Finally, it demands protection systems capable of preventing climatic, health, economic or security shocks from continually pushing households back into poverty.

Sahelian poverty is not merely the residue of low national income. It is reproduced at the intersection of demography, low productivity, unequal access to assets, state fragility and exposure to crises. Reducing it therefore requires far more than targeted projects: it provides the criterion against which demographic, agricultural, educational, industrial, fiscal and security policies should be assessed.

Development can thus be defined, in the Sahelian context, as the progressive construction of an economy and a state capable of reducing simultaneously the poverty rate, the absolute number of the poor and the probability of falling back into poverty. In that sense, the fight against poverty is not a reductive conception of development. It is perhaps its most concrete and most demanding definition.

Selected references

Ansoms, An, et al. "Questioning Rwanda's Pathway out of Poverty." Review of African Political Economy, 2017.

Atamanov, Aziz, et al. "The Growth Elasticity of Poverty: Is Africa Any Different?" Policy Research Working Paper 10702, World Bank, 2024.

Banerjee, Abhijit V., and Esther Duflo. Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. PublicAffairs, 2011.

Booth, David, and Frederick Golooba-Mutebi. "Developmental Patrimonialism? The Case of Rwanda." African Affairs, vol. 111, no. 444, 2012.

Bourguignon, François. "The Poverty-Growth-Inequality Triangle." World Bank, 2004.

Deaton, Angus. The Analysis of Household Surveys: A Microeconometric Approach to Development Policy. Johns Hopkins University Press/World Bank, 1997.

Deaton, Angus. The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. Princeton University Press, 2013.

Cornia, Giovanni Andrea, Richard Jolly and Frances Stewart, eds. 1987. Adjustment with a Human Face: Protecting the Vulnerable and Promoting Growth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, for UNICEF.

Hart, Keith. "Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana." The Journal of Modern African Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1973.

Jack, William, and Tavneet Suri. "The Long-Run Poverty and Gender Impacts of Mobile Money." Science, vol. 354, no. 6317, 2016.

Jerven, Morten. Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It. Cornell University Press, 2013.

Matfess, Hilary. "Rwanda and Ethiopia: Developmental Authoritarianism and the New Politics of African Strong Men." African Studies Review, vol. 58, no. 2, 2015.

National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda. EICV7 Poverty Profile Report 2023/24. Kigali, 2025.

Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press, 1999.

United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Report 1990. Oxford University Press, 1990.

World Bank. World Development Report 1990: Poverty. Oxford University Press, 1990.

World Bank. World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty. Oxford University Press, 2001.

World Bank. Strengthening the Link between Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction in Mali: A Poverty Assessment. Washington, 2021.

World Bank. Niger Poverty and Equity Brief. Washington, October 2024.

World Bank. Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2024: Pathways Out of the Polycrisis. Washington, 2024.