Africa must drive framework for global equality

Global initiatives on inequality are a great step forward, but the problem is that frameworks built mainly on the data and institutions of the global north might not be accurate where the problem is most severe, writes Murray Leibbrandt, UCT Emeritus Professor, and Anda David, senior researcher, Agence Française de Dévelopement, in an analysis in The Conversation. Their remarks come after world leaders were asked to support a proposed International Panel on Inequality. Brazil, Norway, SA and Spain, together with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, made the call on the margins of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York in September. Leibbrandt and David state that the panel would be modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ‘It would assess the scale of inequality, its drivers and consequences, and the policies that can reduce it. The African Union endorsed the initiative in February, and South Africa intends to present a General Assembly resolution to establish it.’ They feel that this is a significant step as inequality could, for the first time, have a permanent scientific body within the multilateral system. But they think that the usefulness of such a panel will depend on whose realities its assessments reflect. ‘To address this problem, we have been closely involved in the development of the African Inequality Review. Its aim is to close the knowledge gap about inequality.

'It will start new cross-country research on African inequality and build a public resource linking the continent’s inequality datasets. For more than a decade the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research has produced country inequality diagnostics and analyses with African researchers and national statistical offices. Our work is summarised in our recent book on inequality in sub-Saharan Africa.’ The review, they say in The Conversation, can offer three things: African-led assessments of inequality, grounded in the continent’s institutions and labour markets; linked data infrastructure needed to study rents, assets and fiscal choices alongside household outcomes a model of research designed with policymakers rather than delivered to them. Lieibbrandt and David believe Africa will shape the future of global inequality. ‘According to UN projections, sub-Saharan Africa will account for more than half of world population growth through to the end of this century. Almost all the global growth of the economically active population will come from Africa. Most Africans are concentrated at the bottom of the global income distribution, so this demographic shift pulls the world’s distribution with it. Between 1990 and 2016, the share of the world’s poorest income decile living in sub-Saharan Africa rose from about one in five to one in three, according to African Development Bank and World Bank estimates.’ 

Lieibbrandt and David note in The Conversation that inequality within African countries is also among the highest in the world. ‘The continent has seven of the world’s 10 most unequal countries. In 2019, the richest 10% of Africans received about 54% of total income, and the poorest half received 9%. The prospects of Africa’s young and growing population will therefore determine where global inequality goes. An international panel without a strong African evidence base would be assessing the past of global inequality rather than its future. That evidence base remains thin. The picture of African inequality is based on fewer country observations than other regions. And different databases present markedly different pictures of the levels and changes in inequality on the continent.’ 

Full analysis in The Conversation