Five Myths about Us

Famine is due to food shortages; Drought or conflict can certainly lead to much reduced food production in particular areas. But it’s rare that a country as a whole has insufficient food and the market can always bring supplies in from other place, or even from abroad. Famine occurs because individuals can no longer afford to buy food so there’s no point traders bringing is any to sell. Famine is really the result of gragile, poor lives, where just one bad harvest- or the death of a cow, a collapse in crop prices, the loss of a job – can leave anyone with nothing, and no means to provide for your family.

Africa is overpopulated and we keep having too many children; For its size, Africa is relatively under-populated. Indian is barely a tenth as big and supports more people. The problem is that economic growth too often lags behind population growth; land use is inefficient and pressure on good land intensifies in the absence of other opportunities for employment. With stable growth and the new jobs it brings, Africa’s population could afford considerable expansion. But in any case, birth rates tend to fall where growth, education and health provision improve.


HIV/AIDS (Over 2 million a year).  If you get it in Africa – and 70 per cent of the people in the world with HIV live in Africa – you don’t and you will soon die once full-blow AIDS takes hold, unless you’re one of a very lucky few to go and get the ART.

Malaria (about 1 million a year). Aside from the deaths, malaria takes a massive toll in sickness and loss of productivity, with hundreds of millions suffering bout every years. But with proper treatment and use of bed nets, it could be reduced enormously. Southern Europe used to suffer from malaria; it’s now all but extinct.

Diarrhoeal diseases (about 700,00 a year). Yes, people die from diarrhea, especially the vulnerable, such as young children, all for want of simple treatment like oral re-hydration and access to clean water.

And so on and so forth. More than 4 million children in Africa under five die every year; two-thirds of their deaths could be avoided with low-cost solutions like Vitamin A supplements, insecticide-treated bed nets and oral re-hydration tablets.

In a rare success story, polio is close to being wiped out in Africa, largely due to a mass inoculation campaign since 1988. Nearly all OUR diseases is about poverty.