Determinants and Prevalence of Rural Poverty in West, East and Southern African Countries

In this paper, we determine the extent to which the variation in poverty incidence can be explained by institutional/community factors, and how the results can be used to evaluate the potential impact on poverty levels of change in factors found to have a significant influence on poverty incidence in some selected countries of East, Southern and West Africa. At the country level, the set of important variables is diverse and includes access to infrastructure (institutional dummy variables), and village resources endowment (community-based variables). The findings derived from this paper suggest that more than Four-fifths of households in the study area need to be escaped from poverty. We also found that the poverty rate could be lowered by 17% to 89% in the involved countries through investment/actions leading to access to input and output markets, awareness and adoption of improved crop varieties and best-bet practices, better access to rural credit and capacity building of community-based organizations. This indicates that these variables can have powerful effects in terms of long-term poverty reduction strategies.