Paper - Initiative for Policy Dialogue

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brought about by support for these sectors on a very broad front”. Sustained, rapid
growth and structural change then is particularly important for poverty reduction in
Africa. We have focused on some fundamental policy requirements for such outcomes in
Africa. A.R. Khan notes several others: the importance of public investment in providing
infrastructure and human capital.
Critics of “pro-poor” growth worry that the focus on poverty will reduce the overall
growth rate, and thus long term prospects for poverty reduction. This raises the question
of whether for countries with particularly poor growth and essentially stagnant or falling
per capita incomes, should one focus first, just on growth Is that a challenging enough
task without overburdening the agenda with also influencing the pattern of growth to
ensure that it is pro-poor
The experience of East Asia suggests that focusing in distribution may actually
contribute to sustained growth. Indeed, one can ask, can some African countries afford to
neglect the issue of making growth pro-poor “Shared growth” is essential for political
sustainability of reforms.
Indeed, in low-income African countries, rapid growth in the initial stages, unless
based on natural resources, is necessarily pro-poor: it is not possible to have strong
overall growth without healthy growth of agriculture and small-and-medium enterprises
(SMEs), precisely where the jobs for the poor are. The distributional impact of growth in
low-income Africa should be of central concern where it is fuelled by natural resources.
In such countries, inequality cannot be justified as a necessary consequence of providing
incentives. The striking thing is that, nonetheless, such countries are typically marked by
high levels of inequality.
Another essential ingredient of making growth pro-poor is, of course, investment in
the human capital of the poor. That health, education, fertility reduction and poverty
alleviation are a seamless web has gained widespread recognition since this nexus was
emphasized in the World Development Report 1980 58 , the World Bank’s first such report
on poverty. Since then these issues have received much attention in the literature. The
World Development Report 1998, focusing on knowledge in development acknowledged
that it was a great mistake to neglect post-primary education in Africa. Investment in
human capital of the poor is vital both as an end as a mean.
The paper by Ansu and Tan looks at the issue of higher level skills for growth. In
Africa there is the anomaly of a shortage of high-level skills, while the region is a
significant exporter of these skills; moreover those who remain in their countries are
often underutilized with high rates of unemployment for those with higher education and
many of those employed being engaged in activities other than those for which they were
trained. A two-track approach to be pursued simultaneously is proposed. One is for quick
results utilizing those with higher education and another is a longer-term effort at a
systematic transformation of the education system.
58 World Bank (1980), World Development Report 1980 (Oxford University Press, New York)