One People-One Goal-One Faith, Omega Plan for Africa

Abstract

Since the 1970s, Africa has gone through economic and social difficulties that are gradually edging it out of the mainstream of world affairs. A few micro-economic indicators will show that its performance, on the whole, has been quite middling with stagnating economies characterized by double-digit chronic balance-of-payments and budget deficits, heavy indebtedness and weak growth. While Africa’s average income accounted for 14 percent of the income of developed countries in the mid-1960s, this ratio had by 1997 been reduced to no more than 7 percent of the GDP growth rate. The average annual growth rate from 1965 to 1993 was a mere 0.5 percent and fell far below the population growth rate that increased from 2.9 to 4.1 percent per annum. As a result, Africa, which accounted in 1994 for 12 percent of the world’s population, was producing less than 1 percent of global GDP.