Since then, the adoption of a new investment code, improved access to credit and somewhat faster access to water have contributed to a sharp increase in foreign direct investment. The country—along with Sierra Leone, Niger and two dozen others worldwide—is also on a list of nations on the frontline of impending Covid-19-driven food crises compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP). With about 90% of its nearly 12 million citizens relying on subsistence agriculture (and the overwhelming majority of them living on $1.25 a day or less) food scarcity is a major concern: the level of food insecurity, in fact, is almost twice as high as the average for sub-Saharan African countries. Resource: The World Factbook More Bad News From Africa.
The main culprit is the brutal civil war that—stemming from the desperate social and economic conditions of the population, the youngest in particular—erupted in 1991 and lasted until 2002. This figure is not really informative about extreme poverty relative to the International Poverty Line used by the World Bank: the official US poverty estimates refer to individuals living in households with incomes below a much higher threshold than the International Poverty Line. Nevertheless, poverty is still widespread, and the nation’s economy— largely dependent upon rain-fed crops—remains vulnerable to weather-related shocks. Today, more households in developing countries own a mobile phone than have access to electricity or improved sanitation. According the World Bank, poverty fell from over 83% to 47% between 2000 and 2009 and fell further from 37% to 30% between 2012 and 2016. The human side of poverty aside, categorizing the poorest countries in the world isn’t as simple as ranking total wealth. Meanwhile, protests also erupted in many parts of the world in response to changes in prices of basic commodities, like energy, transport, and food.Over the last decade, the number of people living without electricity has fallen from 1.2 billion in 2010, to 840 million in 2017, according to the Many people still without electricity live in rural areas and in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 573 million people lack access.
Yet, while the country has so far reported a relatively low number of cases, the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing economic vulnerabilities, prompting the government to review down its growth projections for the year from 6.9% to 1%.This small East African nation of just 3.5 million is one world’s least developed. Today, just 10 percent of the world is living in extreme poverty, a huge improvement from 29 in 1995 and a third of the percentage.But, there is still much to be done. Elected as president in 2017 with a program that focused on job creation, economic diversification and investment in critical infrastructure projects, his electoral promises were undermined by the decline in mining exports and rising inflation accompanied by the depreciation of the Liberian dollar.