Africa's Performance in Leaving No Child Behind in Poverty

How is Africa performing in leaving no child behind in poverty? Disparities exist in child poverty issues across countries: millions of children’s lives are blighted for no other reason than the country, the community, the gender, or the circumstances into which they are born. Due to uneven progress, we compared under-five mortality rates (U5MR), primary school enrolment (PSE), and child underweight (CU) across country clusters of low and middle income, and low U5MR and high U5MR in Africa. Endogeneity issues led to the use of Three Stages Least Squares simultaneous equations, and we applied elasticity to allow direct comparisons between elasticities across country clusters. African countries in low income and high U5MR clusters are far from leaving no child behind. These clusters display common causes of child poverty, including low gender parity index, low PSE, high CU, high numbers of out-of-school children, and poor governance. The estimated elasticities indicate that ethnolinguistic fractionalisation (women’s access to credit) and CU have the greatest effect on U5MR (child poverty), while crop production index (CPI), U5MR and CU have the greatest effect on PSE. CPI and female enrolment in secondary and vocational school have the greatest effect on CU. These findings imply that economic and social policies should consider allocating more resources to low-income and high-U5MR countries. Furthermore, the results tend to point to agriculture as a solution to child poverty issues in Africa. This occurs through an enabling environment for women in agriculture to access productive resources