Causes of poverty in Africa

Africa is the world's second largest continent and home to 900 million people. It is extremely diverse in terms of ethnicity, language and culture and we should not fall into the trap of thinking that every person in this huge land mass are one and the same; the tragically thin children, the grieving mothers, the masked soldiers clutching AK47s. We should not forget that there are also millions of people in Africa who live relatively comfortable lives and do not conform to our western stereotypes!
However, it is a clear fact that Africa contains many of the poorest countries in the world. So what causes this terrible poverty? The reasons are diverse and complex, and can not be explained simply in the macro-economic language of major institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF who have tried to alleviate this poverty with the one-size fits all shock methods of the free market. These countries are not poor simply because they don't have enough cash, and not even because the don't have enough food. The poverty is created by lack of access to jobs, lack of basic public infrastructure (schools, medical care, etc), and lack of access to food. Many African counties are blighted by long running civil wars and corrupt governments, which makes it very difficult to get hold of supplies or build the necessary infrastructure.

The colonial history of the continent has left a cruel legacy of dictatorships and plundered resources. Africa's huge reserves of mineral wealth are divided up between the giant multinationals based in Europe and the United States - local people are unlikely to receive a share of the huge profits being made. How can businesses based in Africa possibly compete with Exxon or Citibank?

We also need to take in to account Africa's geography when attempting to define causes of poverty. It's south-north axis, massive deserts, barren plains and thick jungles do not make a good mix if you are trying to build a prosperous society.

I can only glance over the causes of poverty in Africa and it would need an entire book to describe them properly. There is also another problem - "poverty" can be defined in many different ways.