2000

2002

2005

Human Development

Full datasets for each sub-sub-category are linked to in the text below
and at the foot of this page.

Governments are charged by their constituents with supplying the political good of effective human development. Everywhere, especially in Africa, citizens expect their governments to provide opportunities for educational advancement, health care and medical and sanitary services, and poverty mitigation and alleviation. The Index of African Governance Category for Human Development thus divides the overall political good of human development into those three components, for a total of twenty-one sub-sub-categories. By measuring each of the SSCs, and weighting each of the three groupings of SSCs equally, the Index arrives at a measurement of each of the components of Human Development and, overall, of Human Development as a major category of good or less good governance.

Human Development thus comprises:

An Analysis of National Poverty Results

1. What percent of all nationals live on less than $1 day (the globally recognized poverty figure), mostly derived from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) compilations.

2. What percent of all nationals live below their own national poverty line, mostly derived from OECD and WDI compilations.

3. How equal or unequal is the national distribution of income? This figure is represented by the Gini Index, which measures the extent to which the distribution of income deviates from a perfectly equal distribution. It is mostly derived from WDI compilations.

Data on each of these measures are based on household surveys, which are undertaken by national statistical agencies and other organizations only at intervals. Thus, although the most up-to-date figure is used in all cases, the figures employed by this Index may be drawn from surveys conducted as far back as 1990.¹

A variety of sources were reviewed to obtain the most recent figures available, including the World Development Indicators, the OECD and African Development Bank’s African Economic Outlook, UNDP’s Human Development Report, the Millennium Development Goals Indicators, and various publications of the African Development Bank. It is not unusual for poverty and inequality numbers, even in developed countries, to be over a decade out-of-date. For instance, the 2006 Human Development Report uses 1994 figures for Australia, 1993 figures for Japan, 1999 figures for the UK, and 2000 figures for the U.S.²

An Analysis of Health Outcomes

1. Life expectancy at birth, expressed in years, collected by the WDI, based on various sources, including census reports and data from national statistical offices and the UN Population Division’s World Population Prospects.

2. Infant mortality per 1000 live births, based on WDI estimates of data from the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and World Bank sources.

3. Maternal mortality per 100,000 live births. Data are from the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) Indicators, which draws on data from WHO and UNICEF.

4. Undernourishment (percentage of the population whose food intake is below the minimum dietary energy requirements), as determined by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and compiled in the WDI.

5. Percentage of children (aged 12-23 months) immunized against measles, according to the WHO and UNICEF, as reported in the WDI.

6. Percentage of children (aged 12-23 months) immunized against diptheria, pertussis (whooping cough), and tetanus (DPT), according to the WHO and UNICEF, as reported in the WDI.

7. Percentage of people (aged 15-49 years) living with HIV, from the MDG Indicators.

8. Estimated number of new TB cases (incidence) per 100,000 people, from the WHO’s Global Tuberculosis Control Report, as reported in the WDI.

9. Access to qualified physicians: density of physicians per 1000 people, from the WHO.

10. Access to trained nurses: density of nurses per 1000 people, from the WHO.

11. Percentage of the population with access to potable water, from the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program for Water Supply and Sanitation.

An Analysis of Educational Opportunity

1. Adult literacy, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and other sources.

2. Adult literacy among women, according to UNESCO and other sources.

3. Primary school completion rate (the percentage of school-aged children who complete the last year of primary school), from UNESCO as reported in the WDI.

4. Primary school completion rate among girls, from UNESCO as reported in the WDI.

5. Pupil/Teacher ratio in primary schools, from UNESCO as reported in the WDI.

6. Persistence: Progression of all students from primary to secondary school, from UNESCO as reported in the WDI.

7. Ratio of female to male students in primary and secondary schools, from UNESCO as reported in the WDI.

Special Notes

Although the WHO’s excellent Health-Adjusted Life Expectancy (HALE) would have been a useful measure to include, it has not been updated beyond 2002. HALE is a indicator of the equivalent number of years a person is expected to live in “full health,” taking into account life expectancy, adult and child mortality, and the burden of disease (incidence, prevalence, and duration and years lived with disability due to over a hundred major causes).

Figures for the incidence of malaria in each country were desired, but data are largely unavailable for 2000, 2002, and 2005 for African countries. Neither the MDG Indicators nor the WDI include data for malaria incidence or the death rate due to malaria. Both sources have some, but incomplete, data on malaria prevention (use of bed nets and access to anti-malarial drugs). The best source we found was the African Economic Outlook, which includes the number of notified cases for most countries, but only for various years from 1995 to 2003.

Numbers for the percentage of trained teachers were available only for a small portion of the African countries for the years required.³

We collected data on enrollment in tertiary education from UNESCO and the WDI. However, we judged those data to be missing for too many African countries in too many years to be included as a sub-sub-category for this year. We also collected data on the percentage of the labor force with a tertiary education as an alternative measure, but those data were missing for almost all of our countries in all years. The UNDP's Human Development Index measures some of the same issues as the Index of African Governance’s Human Development Category, but it does so by providing numbers only for life expectancy, educational attainment (adult literacy and gross enrollment rates), and GDP per capita.

Notes and datasets for sub-sub-categories in Human Development

¹ The WDI measure is used when sources conflict.

² Table 15.

³ UNESCO data on trained teachers cover fifteen countries for at least one year during 2000 to 2006.