African Poverty: Influence of Climate Change and Inequality Since the 1990s

Despite steady GDP growth since the 1990s, extreme poverty in Africa remains prevalent due to environmental degradation and multidimensional inequality. This paper examines how inequality and climate change aggravate poverty in African countries, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and Niger. This paper discusses the effects of the Gini coefficient and multidimensional poverty index on perpetuating a cycle of poverty in these underdeveloped countries. By implementing several varied scenarios, this paper demonstrates how severe weather events generate economically challenging situations for these countries to cope with. The high reliance on agricultural production led to increased migration and food insecurity, denying those below the poverty line access to resources. It underscored that both climate change and poverty hindered the propensity for these African countries to escape from the poverty trap, despite equilibrium GDP growth. This paper provides two additional contributions beyond existing literatures. First, it disaggregates inequality into different dimensions for the governments economic decision-making. Second, through Africas extreme weather, it offers a focused examination of how climate change has constrained economic resources.