Determinants of Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the determinants of poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa using a set of cross-country data drawn from 48 countries. It adopts a multiple regression analysis. The results obtained indicates that factors like increase in the rate of population, inflation and external debt servicing, lack of safe water, low economic activities, gender discrimination, ethnic and religious conflicts and HIV/AIDS have influenced the increase in the rate poverty in the sub-region. Given these results, measures such as debt forgiveness, use of family planning devices, stable macro-economic variables like inflation and exchange rate volatility and good governance are suggested as possible solutions to poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa.