It’s just after sunrise in the hills of Kapchorwa, eastern Uganda. A smallholder farmer, barefoot and bent over with age, tends to her coffee shrubs.
She’s been growing the crop for over 20 years.
Each harvest brings hope, but rarely enough income to fix a leaky roof, pay school fees, or treat her.
Her beans are world-class. In fact, Uganda is one of the top 10 coffee exporters globally.
The beans she picks may end up brewed in a Paris café or sipped in a San Francisco tech hub.
But for her, the profits remain a distant dream.
This is the face of Africa’s great paradox—a continent overflowing with wealth, but home to the world’s poorest.
It’s what Kwame Nkrumah warned about in 1961.
“We have in Africa the paradox of poverty amid plenty, and scarcity amid abundance,” he said then.
More than six decades later, his words still echo. But now the paradox has evolved—deepened.
The math doesn’t add up—but it’s not a mystery
In 1990, Africa accounted for just one in 10 of the world’s poor. By 2024, that number had jumped to seven in 10.
And while the continent now makes up just 20% of the global population, it carries the heaviest burden of extreme poverty.
How did this happen?
Not because Africa lacks resources.
From coffee and cocoa to cobalt and copper, the continent brims with the raw materials the world runs on.
Several economists understand that the problem is how that wealth is managed.
Who really profits from Africa’s wealth?
Case 1: Congo’s cobalt and the global tech boom
The DR Congo produces over 70% of the world’s cobalt, a mineral that powers your smartphone, laptop, and electric car.
Global tech giants—Apple, Tesla, Samsung—depend on it.
But in the mining communities of DR Congo, poverty is the name of the game.
Some miners work 10–12 hours a day, often without proper gear, for as little as $1–2 a day.
Roads are crumbling, schools are scarce, and basic healthcare is a luxury.
So while Silicon Valley celebrates innovation, the hands that dig the minerals remain invisible, unprotected, and unpaid.
Case 2: Zambia’s copper and corporate tax avoidance
Zambia, one of Africa’s top copper producers, faces a different but equally damaging problem—tax avoidance.
Global mining firms use legal loopholes and offshore tax havens to shift profits, on which they pay minimal taxes.
The result? Billions in potential revenue are lost each year—money that could fund schools, hospitals, and roads.
This isn’t just an economic problem.
It’s a moral failure, especially when ordinary Zambians are asked to pay more tax while corporations contribute crumbs.
A crisis of fairness, not just poverty
Africa now faces a double inequality crisis.
It is one within its borders, where the rich have accumulated vast fortunes while millions go hungry.
Across borders—where elites and multinationals extract wealth, often backed by the very institutions meant to support development.
The statistics are stark: Oxfam’s 2025 research data shows that Africa’s richest 5% own more than the bottom 95% combined.
Forbes data, for instance, shows that four billionaires in Africa have more wealth than 750 million people.
In countries like Nigeria, tax waivers given to billionaire-linked firms totaled ₦5 trillion in 2024, about 18.5% of the federal budget.
Meanwhile, ordinary citizens face austerity, rising food prices, and unemployment.
Many think-tanks think this is just bad policy and not bad luck.
How we got here
Much of Africa’s economic structure today was shaped by structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) pushed by IMF and World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s.
The SAPs called for deep budget cuts, privatisation of public assets, removal of subsidies, and a heavy shift toward indirect taxation.
The result? A weakened state unable to deliver basic services—and a booming private sector that catered to the rich and politically connected.
Austerity policies are back again, driven by new debt crises. But this time, citizens are pushing back.
In Kenya, protests over finance bills have turned deadly. In Angola, frustration boils over on the streets.
Across the continent, people are asking: ‘Who is the economy really working for?’
Taxing the super-rich
Economists, think tanks, and civil society groups agree: ‘Taxing the ultra-wealthy is one of the most powerful tools to reduce inequality.’
It does two things: Reduces wealth concentration, and raises revenue to invest in public goods like health, education, and infrastructure.
In 2024, the African Union acknowledged this crisis and set a bold target under its Agenda 2063: reduce inequality by 15% in the next decade.
But sovereign economic planners understand that ambition must meet action.
They argue that African leaders have a unique window to act, joining a global movement to tax the super-rich, curb illicit financial flows, and rewrite the social contract.
The scale of African inequality
The world’s richest 5% owned twice as much wealth as everyone else combined in 2022, according to Oxfam research.
By May 2025, billionaires globally had amassed $16.5 trillion—an increase of $2.1 trillion in just one year, marking the highest concentration of wealth ever recorded.
Inequality is rising everywhere, but Africa feels it the most.
Almost half of the 50 most unequal countries are in Africa, based on World Bank data.
While 44% of African countries now have a Gini coefficient above 0.40, a level the World Bank considers dangerously unequal.
In simple terms, the gap between the top 10% and the bottom 50% in Africa is one of the worst in the world.
Covid-19 exacerbated the situation, pushing 55 million more Africans into poverty.
It also reversed global progress in reducing the income gap between rich and poor countries, as per World Bank Group data.
Consequently, many African nations sank deeper into debt, and food prices soared.
That hit poor households hardest.
Several sovereign economic data already show that low-income families spend most of their money on food, so rising prices mean choosing between meals and medicine.
In 2023, 846.6 million Africans faced food insecurity, up by 167 million since 2019, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
But while hunger grows, Africa’s richest are getting richer.
The share of income going to the top 1% and 10% has gone up since 2019, while the share for the bottom 50% has dropped.
The World Inequality Database (WID), previously the World Wealth and Income Database, shows inequality has worsened or stagnated in 41% of African countries over the past decade.
The database is an extensive, open, and accessible historical evolution of the world distribution of income and wealth, both within countries and between countries”.
The number of super-rich is rising too.
At the start of 2000, Africa had no dollar billionaires. Today, there are 23, with a combined wealth of $112.6 billion, according to Forbes.
Shockingly, however, just four individuals now own more wealth than 750 million Africans combined.
One example is the contrast between billionaires in Lagos or Johannesburg, who live in gated mansions, and rural families who walk miles to fetch water or drop out of school due to lack of fees.
This isn’t just about numbers but about fairness, and whether the economy works for the many or just the few.
Spiraling out of control
The question now is how to keep inequality from spiraling further—and there’s every reason to worry.
Reducing inequality isn’t just morally right; it’s strategically smart.
The World Bank notes that countries with high inequality take far longer to eliminate poverty.
However, both the World Bank and Oxfam data shows that if Africa reduced inequality by just 2% per year, poverty would decline 2.4 times faster.
The takeaway? Inequality isn’t simply a side-effect of poverty—it’s one of its main engines.
At the heart of the issue is social mobility. In unequal societies, the odds are stacked from birth.
A child born to uneducated parents is far more likely to stay poor, while those of relatively wealthy families enjoy a head start—better schools, better healthcare, better networks.
This cycle repeats across generations, keeping millions locked out of opportunity.
Inequality also has a gender face. Across Africa, women dominate the poorest income groups.
Avast amount of continental wealth research shows that women are more likely to be denied land, loans, education, and fair pay.
On top of that, they bear the unpaid burden of care work—feeding families, fetching water, nursing the sick.
Meanwhile, men hold most of the wealth and economic power, something that means that tackling inequality confronts these deep gender injustices too.
Then comes the economic argument: inequality stunts growth.
When wealth is concentrated at the top, fewer people have money to spend.
That depresses demand, slows business activity, and weakens economies.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), warns that once the Gini index passes 0.27, inequality starts to hurt growth.
In other words, economies grow faster when prosperity is more evenly shared.
But it’s not just about money—it’s about power.
Wealth buys influence. A small elite can use their resources to shape policy, capture political processes, and sway elections.
This erodes democracy and silences the majority.
In fact, surveys show many Africans believe rich people regularly “buy” elections, a sign that inequality is warping democratic systems.
The social effects are just as grim.
High-inequality countries tend to have worse health, lower school achievement, higher teenage pregnancy rates, and more incarceration.
Economists understand that ‘these aren’t random outcomes—they’re the predictable results of a system where success and wellbeing are tied to wealth and background.’
And then there’s the climate crisis. The richest are the biggest polluters—private jets, SUVs, luxury consumption.
But the poorest pay the highest price: floods, droughts, rising food costs.
The irony? Those suffering the most contributed the least to the problem.
As Oxfam researchers put it in research notes: “To fight climate change, we must reduce emissions—but also redistribute opportunity.”
The idea is that when people have more income and security, they can invest in clean energy, sustainable practices, and climate resilience.
Justice, then, becomes a survival strategy.
In short, inequality multiplies every major problem—from poverty and poor governance to climate collapse and the cost of doing nothing is simply too high.
Africa is now ground zero
Across the continent, leading African economists have been sounding the alarm.
Escalating inequality is no longer just a worrying trend—it’s a humanitarian emergency.’
They warn that the continent’s growing share of the world’s poorest people is not only staggering but accelerating.
As they often put it, “extreme poverty is increasingly becoming an African problem.”
The numbers paint a sobering picture. Back in 1990, Africa accounted for one in 10 of the world’s population and one in 10 of those living in extreme poverty, UN data shows.
Fast forward to 2024, and the continent now holds two in ten people globally—but a shocking seven in ten of the world’s extremely poor.
This is a shift that didn’t happen overnight.
It is proof that poverty is becoming more concentrated, not less, despite decades of development discourse and donor pledges.
Since 2020, an additional 41.3 million people in Africa have fallen into extreme poverty.
At the current trajectory, experts estimate it would take over 600 years to eradicate extreme poverty on the continent.
It is a timeline that is so disheartening – it reads more like satire than statistics.
What makes this situation even more frustrating is that Africa isn’t poor because of a lack of solutions.
In fact, Oxfam’s modelling shows that by simply reducing inequality by 2% per year, and pairing that with modest economic growth of 2%, Africa could lift 71 million people out of poverty by 2030.
That’s 14.2 million people per year—roughly the entire population of Zimbabwe—saved from extreme poverty each year.
Former Marsh Uganda Chief Executive, Alexander Mukasa, Replaces Gary Corbit as SanlamAllianz Life Insurance HeadUnder this scenario, extreme poverty would be eliminated 2.4 times faster than if inequality remained untouched.
The math is clear: inequality is not just immoral, it’s inefficient and tackling it aggressively offers Africa its best shot at turning the tide.
The prosperity gap: Africa’s steepest climb
In 2024, the World Bank introduced a new measure called the Prosperity Gap.
It calculates how many times a country’s average income must grow to reach a modest prosperity benchmark—$25 a day (in purchasing power parity terms).
Sub-Saharan Africa’s current average income is just $2 per day, meaning the region’s income must grow by more than 12 times to hit this benchmark.
What’s worse, inequality skews this gap even further within countries.
Take Zambia and Niger, two nations with nearly identical average incomes.
You’d think their prosperity gaps would be similar, yet not.
Zambia would need to multiply its average income 23.1 times, while Niger only needs to grow by 12.6 times.
Why the difference? Zambia is significantly more unequal.
This shows that it’s not just about raising incomes—it’s about ensuring those gains are distributed fairly.
Otherwise, growth becomes a tide that lifts yachts, not boats.
Women and girls bear the brunt
But behind every number lies a story—often a woman’s story.
Across Africa, women and girls are disproportionately burdened by inequality.
They perform billions of hours of unpaid care and domestic work—cooking, cleaning, farming, and caring for the sick and elderly.
It is labour that is invisible in GDP figures but vital to survival.
Yet, it remains unrecognized, undervalued, and unsupported.
Women are also central to food production—working the land, processing crops, feeding families.
But according to recent research by the International Land Coalition, they own barely any of the land they till.
And as a result, their voices are sidelined in decisions, and their economic agency is stifled.
Furthermore, the informal sector, which employs the vast majority of African women, offers little security.
Low pay, dangerous working conditions, and a complete lack of legal protection define the day-to-day reality for millions of women.
This triple injustice—poverty, gender, and informality—makes inequality not just economic, but profoundly social and deeply gendered.
Engineered inequality?
A couple of patterns do demonstrate that Africa’s staggering levels of inequality didn’t arise naturally.
They are the product of structural forces—policies, institutions, and global power dynamics that consistently favor a wealthy few.
Africa’s economic policies tilt toward elites, while the working poor, small enterprises, and informal workers are left behind.
This pattern is rooted in neoliberal economic models imposed by IMF and World Bank, during the SAPs in the 1980s and 1990s.
The programmes, touted as cures for fiscal crisis, instead weakened public institutions and slashed essential services.
This enriched the politically connected but devastated the poor.
The fallout from those policies still lingers. And now, in the wake of Africa’s growing debt burden, austerity is back—with deadly consequences.
Countries like Kenya and Angola have seen mass protests, sometimes violent, in response to budget cuts, subsidy removals, and regressive taxation that push the burden of economic adjustment onto the poor.
Crony capitalism & wealth concentration
Contrary to the myth that billionaires are more hardworking or innovative, Oxfam’s 2025 research shows that more than 60% of global billionaire wealth is tied to political cronyism, monopolistic advantages, corruption, or inheritance.
In Africa, these forces are particularly entrenched, with the super-rich often building their fortunes through privileged access to state resources, protective policies, and sweetheart deals.
The story of Aliko Dangote, Africa’s richest man, illustrates this vividly.
His business empire, especially in the cement industry, thrived not just through market savvy but through state-backed advantages during Nigeria’s privatization wave in the 2000s.
Over time, government policies such as tax waivers, protective tariffs, and import bans further cemented his market dominance.
This allowed Dangote Cement to report net profits of 86% in 2016, while paying an effective tax rate of just 2%.
This kind of preferential treatment doesn’t just stifle competition—it actively harms the economy in three ways.
Small businesses are squeezed out, unable to compete with monopolies, consumers pay higher prices, due to lack of competition, and governments lose vital tax revenue.
Austerity for the poor, tax breaks for the rich
The injustice deepens when we contrast this elite favoritism with the harsh austerity measures being imposed on ordinary citizens.
While billionaire-linked companies receive tax breaks and incentives, the welfare systems and public services relied upon by millions are being gutted.
The Nigerian case is especially stark.
By 2024, tax waivers offered to Dangote, Sino Trucks West Africa, LafargeAfrica, Honeywell Flour Mills, Jigawa Rice, and Stallion Motors had reached a ₦5 trillion, equivalent to 18.5% of Nigeria’s entire federal budget.
In effect, the government is funding inequality, subsidizing wealth accumulation for a few while imposing fuel price hikes, cutting education budgets, and slashing healthcare spending.
A broken social contract
This lopsided arrangement isn’t just economically flawed—it’s socially corrosive and politically explosive.
When ordinary people watch billionaires grow richer through government favoritism, while they’re told to “tighten their belts,” trust in public institutions crumbles.
Resentment builds, and over time, protest becomes inevitable.
What we’re witnessing is a breakdown of the social contract—the basic understanding that everyone contributes fairly, and the state protects the common good.
Instead, in many African countries, the state now serves elite interests, while abandoning the majority who depend on it most.
So, what needs to change?
Oxfam believes that tackling inequality in Africa requires more than charity and donor aid.
It calls for a rewriting of the economic rules—rules that have long been tilted in favor of the few.
The idea now is to tax the ultra-rich and large corporations progressively, so the burden doesn’t fall on the poor.
There is also need to reform public procurement and privatization to ensure transparency—not backdoor deals for the well-connected, end harmful tax holidays that enrich politically connected firms.
This allows small businesses a real shot at growth and reverses austerity, and invest boldly in public services.
In short, the argument among the continental think-tanks is that Africa doesn’t need more billionaires..
It needs systems that reward hard work and productivity, not privilege and proximity to power.
“That’s how real development happens—and how trust in society is rebuilt,” Oxfam notes in its 2025 report: “Africa’s inequality crisis and the rise of the Super-Rich.
Possibilities of reducing inequality
Some African countries have proven that reducing inequality is possible—with the right policies. Southern Africa offers encouraging examples.
In Seychelles, the income share of the poorest 50% has risen by 76% since 2000, while the share held by the richest 1% has dropped by two-thirds.
Why? The government invests in universal access to quality healthcare and education, and its strong welfare programmes offer real protection to vulnerable citizens.
Botswana, Lesotho, and Namibia—though still grappling with high inequality—have also made solid progress.
Botswana, for instance, channels its diamond wealth into public services like education, housing, and healthcare.
As a result, the income share of its poorest half is now 50% higher than it was in 2000.
But in most African countries, inequality has either widened or barely improved in the last decade.
This is partly because economic inequality intersects with inequality of opportunity, especially in access to essential services.
Despite global commitments to 12 years of free, quality education, a couple of surveys show that 54% of African parents still worry about school fees.
For many, it’s their top financial concern.
The divide is stark: One in five of the richest young adults completes four years of tertiary education, compared to less than one in 100 of the poorest, data from the World Bank Group shows.
The rich often study abroad, especially in elite institutions, fast-tracking them into high-paying roles, while the poor remain locked out of opportunity.
This inequality in access to services reinforces economic inequality, creating a vicious cycle.
The good news? Reducing inequality is within reach.
The African Union has set a clear target: cut inequality by 15% over the next decade.
If countries meet that goal—equivalent to a 1.5% annual reduction—Africa’s average Gini coefficient could fall from 0.41 to 0.35.
That six-point drop might sound small, but the impact would be massive.
Millions would be lifted out of poverty, better access to public services, and a fairer playing field for the next generation.
Too often, African development strategies focus on GDP growth alone.
But these figures show clearly. Many established economists understand that growth without equality is not enough.
The global awakening on inequality—but is it enough?
Global institutions and African bodies now understand that inequality is a crisis that can no longer be ignored.
The African Union, through its latest 10-year strategy under Agenda 2063, has responded with a bold but achievable target: cut inequality by 15% over the next decade.
The AU has backed the goal with four grounded policy priorities that could make a real difference if taken seriously.
The policy seeks to recognize informal and domestic work through minimum wage protections and social safety nets and create unemployment insurance to support those out of work
It also seeks to introduce pro-poor tax reforms, shifting the burden toward the wealthy and providing food assistance to vulnerable households.
This is because most people work informally, live without job security, and face frequent food price spikes.
The idea is that if governments commit to these policies, they could close the vast gap between wealth and struggle.
SDG 10: A half-finished job
At the global level, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 10 is the headline commitment to reduce inequality “within and among countries.”
However, unlike the AU, the SDG framework doesn’t set a specific target for reducing inequality.
Instead, it vaguely encourages faster income growth among the poorest 40% than the national average (Indicator 10.1) and some monitoring of fiscal redistribution (Indicator 10.4.2).
While these are steps in the right direction, they miss a critical part of the inequality equation.
The unchecked and rising wealth accumulation among the richest people remains a challenge.
A laser focus on only raising the floor while ignoring the exploding ceiling creates a warped picture.
It is like bailing water from a sinking boat while ignoring the gaping hole letting it in.
World Bank and IMF: A mixed record of words vs. action
In 2024, the World Bank took a historic step by introducing an inequality measurement indicator, defining “high inequality” as a Gini coefficient greater than 0.4.
While this is a symbolic milestone, many experts—including Oxfam—argue that the threshold is too generous.
Why? Because societies start to suffer economically and socially, even at lower levels of inequality.
Even more troubling is the Bank’s retreat from bold stances on progressive taxation.
Its recent messaging has failed to reinforce the need for taxing the super-rich, and its policy advice to countries still leans toward austerity and regressive tax structures.
The IMF, for its part, has yet to adopt any formal inequality targets.
And while it has produced research showing that inequality hurts economic growth, it has not translated into consistent, inequality-reducing policy recommendations.
The 2024 statement by IMF acknowledging the moral and economic failure of persistent inequality was powerful.
But as Oxfam’s analysis shows, actions still lag far behind the rhetoric.
The need for a global power shift?
Oxfam argues that true inequality reduction will require more than just tinkering with domestic policies.
Ending inequality in Africa calls for a paradigm shift in global economic power, from the Global North to the Global South.
This means confronting and dismantling the neocolonial extractive systems that siphon Africa’s wealth to foreign boardrooms and tax havens.
“To reduce both within-country and between-country inequality, Africa must not only implement fair taxation, but also push for global financial justice,” says Oxfam.
The growing institutional recognition of inequality is a promising sign.
But recognition without transformation is not enough.
These institutions know it because inequality is not just a statistical challenge but a daily reality of hunger and exclusion for millions.
“Africa cannot afford inequality as usual—not for another decade, not even for another year,” Oxfam notes.
