Africa: Nine million more workers pushed into extreme poverty in 2020

In Africa, nine million more workers were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020. This is revealed by the latest report from the International Labor Organization (ILO) on global trends in the employment sector.

According to the institution, the rate of working poor fell from 31.8% of the working population in 2019 to 34% in 2020. This means that nine million additional workers were providing for their families with less than 1, $ 9 per day.

Within the continent, it is the sub-Saharan region that concentrates the largest number of workers living in poverty. According to the ILO, 39.1% of the region’s labor force lived in extreme poverty in 2020 compared to only 2.5% for North Africa.

Concretely, in sub-Saharan Africa, eight million workers sank into extreme poverty last year (nearly 90% of the number recorded by the entire continent) against only 1 million in North Africa.

This situation is largely due to the covid-19 pandemic which has destroyed many jobs on the continent, and plunged millions of people into unemployment.

The disparity observed between North Africa and the sub-Saharan region is linked to the importance of precarious and informal jobs in the labor market in countries south of the Sahara.

Thus, while the unemployment rate in North Africa in 2020 (12.7%) was much higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa (6.3%), it is estimated that more than 85% of workers in southern countries of the Sahara are in the informal sector against a little over 70% for North Africa.

“Besides the lack of health and social protection, many features of Africa’s informal economy have made workers particularly vulnerable to the pandemic,” says the ILO.

According to the institution, in the first month of Africa’s covid-19 crisis alone, informal sector workers lost 81% of their income. These figures are in line with the estimates of the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the World Bank, which forecast a significant decline in the gains recorded in recent years in the fight against poverty in Africa, due to covid-19.

In October, the World Bank estimated that 40 million people were at risk of falling into extreme poverty in Africa in 2020. In its economic outlook for Africa published last March, the ADB estimated that 30 million Africans had sunk into extreme poverty last year.

It should also be noted that the ILO estimates that in 2020, nine million other workers sank into “moderate” poverty (with incomes between $ 1.9 and $ 3.2 per day), due to the crisis in the country. coronavirus.

It has already affected a total of more than 4.8 million people on the continent, including 131,441 deaths and more than 4.4 million recoveries.