This article contributes to the debate on poverty trends in Africa, looking at the argument for a correspondence between economic growth and poverty reduction. It questions whether a link between economic growth and poverty reduction can be established. First there is a look at the general picture in Africa and no convincing evidence of this link is found, before the article turns to two countries, Burkina Faso and Madagascar, which on the surface seem to exemplify the link. However, in Burkina Faso the link exists only in a limited way and for only a short period (1998–2003), while in Madagascar, where the link appears more obvious, social and political unrest in 2009 casts doubt on the reliability of the data. Indeed, it is probable that an increase in poverty contributed to the crisis in Madagascar. Furthermore, there are signs that in both countries poverty strategies are increasingly giving way to Poverty Reduction Growth Facility programmes, closely related to former structural adjustment loans. It is concluded, first, that analysing poverty strategies through Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers does not help in resolving the uncertainty, since these strategies assume a priori the existence of a link between economic growth and poverty reduction; second, that collection and interpretation of poverty data could be biased, with the World Bank, for example, having an interest in showing improvements in poverty reduction in Africa; and, finally, that the paucity of data needs, at the very least, to be recognised as a major problem.
This debate piece discusses how exceptionalised images of Africa are reproduced in contemporary Western discourse and imagination, and argues that these exceptionalised depictions of Africa enable Western consciousness to escape a confrontation with its own dysfunctionalities, hereby projecting all the excremental features characterising human existence on to its African Other. This is interpreted as a way for Western subjects to alter themselves into a position of idealised and imagined advanced civilisationthus legitimising contemporary acts of neo-colonial exploitation in Africa.Africanist scholarship has long discussed how Western imagination up to now has contributed to a construction of Africa as the world's universal Otheran umbrella term that will be unpacked throughout the piece (Ferguson 2006;Mbembe 2001;Mbembe and Nuttall 2004;Mudimbe 1988). 2 One way Western discourse depicts Africa is as a romanticised 'primitive' entity bound to a past of harmonious engagements with 'nature ' (Mudimbe 1988;Wainaina 2006). This is in opposition to the Western self-imagination as a collection
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