African Development Bank

The aim of this paper is to provide a framework that national governments and international agencies can use to accelerate health development in Africa. It shows the respective roles of socioeconomic, political and medical factors in the determination of health status of a population. Using measures of health development such as infant mortality, crude death rate, fertility and longevity, the paper finds that there has been progress in health development in Africa over the past 15 years. In particular, life expectancy for the whole continent increased by some 5 years, a finding consistent with a steady decline in infant mortality over the same period. Even so, the level of health development in the continent remains quite low compared with measures of health status in continents at similar stages of socioeconomic development. Moreover, the quality of life in Africa may not have improved at the same rate as the indicators of health development because of probable increases in morbidity and in psycho-social stress due to economic hardships of the continent over the past 15 years.