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Introduction
Poverty in Africa embraces lack of basic human needs faced by people in African society. Many African nations are very poor and their income per capita or gross domestic product (GDP) per capita fall toward the bottom of list of nations of the world, despite a wealth of natural resources. In 2009, according to United Nations (UN), 22 of 24 nations identified as having "Low Human Development" on the UN's Human Development Index were in sub-Saharan Africa and 34 of the 50 nations on the UN list of least developed countries are in Africa (World Bank, 2006; FAO, 2013; WHO, Climate Change and Health, 2012).
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about 795 million people of the 7.3 billion people in the world, or one in nine, were suffering from chronic undernourishment in 2014-2016. Almost all the hungry people, 780 million, live in developing countries, representing 12.9 per cent, or one in eight, of the population of developing counties. There are 11 million people undernourished in developed countries (Food and Agriculture Organization, 2015). Sub-Saharan Africa was the area with the second largest number of hungry people, as Asia had 512 million, principally due to the much larger population of Asia when compared to sub-Saharan Africa (FAO, 2013).
Poverty is a precursor of malnutrition and poverty has been reported as the principal cause of hunger in Africa and the principal causes of poverty have been found to be harmful economic systems, conflict, environmental factors such as drought and climate change and population growth. A vast majority of hungry people lived in developing regions, which saw a 42 per cent reduction in the prevalence of undernourished people between 1990-1992 and 2012-2014. Despite this progress, about one in eight people, or 13.5 per cent of the overall population, remain chronically undernourished in these regions, down from 23.4 per cent in 1990-1992. As the most populous region in the world, Asia is home to two out of three of the world's undernourished people.
There has been the least progress in the sub-Saharan region, where more than one in four people remain undernourished - the highest prevalence of any region in the world. Nevertheless, the prevalence of undernourishment in sub-Saharan Africa has declined from 33.2 per cent...