Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette

Africans south of the Sahara, an area convulsed in wars and weakened by natural disasters, also suffer the broadest range of social and economic disadvantages, a United Nations survey says.

The survey, the Human Development Report, examines the availability of schools, clean water and medical care, and whether people can play a role in politics. It began 10 years ago as an experiment to measure a nation's growth not by economic figures but by statistical profiles of its people and what they can expect from life.

This year, 30 of the 35 countries at the bottom of the index were in sub-Saharan Africa.

In that region, where the spread of AIDS and other diseases has begun to shorten life spans after decades of slow improvement, people can no longer expect to live beyond their 40's or 50's. Fewer than half go to school and fewer than half -- sometimes 25 percent or less -- can read, the survey shows. It also shows that a large proportion of people -- as high as 66 percent in the case of Sierra Leone -- lack access to clean water, and that even larger majorities lack basic sanitation.

Apart from Sierra Leone, which is ranked last, the other most disadvantaged nations, from the bottom up, are Niger, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Chad, the Central African Republic and Mali.

At the other extreme, the countries with the highest human development indicators are, from the top, Canada, Norway, the United States, Australia, Iceland, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Japan and Britain. In the Western Hemisphere, only Haiti ranks in the bottom 35.

Every year the report, produced by the United Nations Development Program, focuses on new themes that experts say should be factored into studying why some countries remain poor and others grow in economic and human terms. This year the report tried to connect human rights and political freedom with economic and social conditions, saying the two can no longer be separated. It challenges the view that people are not "ready" for democracy until there has been economic growth.

"Human rights are not, as has sometimes been argued, a reward of development," said Mark Malloch Brown, the development program's administrator, in an introduction to the report. "Rather, they are critical to achieving it. Only with political freedoms -- the right for all men and women to participate equally in society -- can people genuinely take advantage of economic freedoms."

In another departure, this year's report, which was issued last week, calls for the increased collection and more effective use of statistics to aid in promoting human rights by quantifying more effectively the conditions under which many people live.

"Statistical indicators are a powerful tool in the struggle for human rights," the report says. Among other benefits even the simple collection of information can provide, it adds, is help in monitoring the actions of government and in curbing corruption.

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