Africa, Poverty and Forces of Change: A Holistic Approach to Perceiving and Addressing Poverty in Africa

Abstract

This work argues that Africa’s condition of poverty lingers because the continent fails to view poverty in its holistic sense in her attempts at tackling her economic challenges. Other types of poverty exist, such as mental poverty, moral poverty, emotional poverty, spiritual poverty, political poverty and social poverty, which pose great problems for the continent. Obviously, her failure to give worthwhile attention to solving these problems largely contribute to why she has not really benefited from her vast wealth of human and material resources. Also, this lack of holistic approach to perceiving poverty often allows Africa to be swayed by global forces of change such as socio-cultural factors, political factors, wars and terrorist activities, technological forces as information technology and electronic media, and so on. Consequently, majority of Africans seem to be blinded to the reality of possibility of redemption from the continents precarious economic condition. Thus, neglecting their nations, they emigrate abroad, under the guise of seeking enabling environment for productivity and survival. At the same time, those at the helms of affairs perpetuate the economic poverty status-quo by greedily enriching themselves. Thus, the continent becomes an unfortunate victim of parochial perspectives as other continents become undeserving beneficiaries of her endowments and heritages. Using philosophy’s critical and argumentative methods of empirical, conceptual and historical analysis, this paper debates that a holistic perspective to poverty can help control global forces of change in ways that will favour Africa’s total development and enhance her profiting in the globalisation era.