Jan 16, 2020

The UN 2019 Human Development Report was released in late 2019, with results for 2018. The corresponding release in 2018, actually deemed a statistical update not a full blown report, came out around September 2018 with results for 2017. Thus, the UNHDR office appears to be having some difficulty producing its reports yearly and may soon need to skip a year, as was done in 2017.

The HDI table divides the world into four categories: low, medium, high and very high. There is a general, slow movement of the African countries upward, into the higher categories. The UN sets the  threshold between Low- and Medium Human Development at 0.550. It is an important psychological barrier. This year much-maligned Zimbabwe makes the jump into the Medium Human Development category, joining Morocco, Cape Verde, Namibia, Sao Tome and Principe, Congo, Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), Ghana, Zambia, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya,  Angola and Cameroon. Egypt and South Africa have graduated from this category into the High Human Development category (threshold 0.700) joining Mauritius, Algeria, Tunisia, Botswana, Libya and Gabon. Seychelles is now in the Very High Human Development category, the only African nation there. The above-mentioned twenty-two nations are the relative high performers in the African context. The rest, thirty-one in all, fall into the dreaded Low Human Development category. Data is unavailable for one African country, Somalia. There are just five non-African nations in Low Human Development: Syria, Papua New Guinea, Haiti, Afghanistan and Yemen.

As with our last report, of the fifteen West African nations, thirteen are in the Low Human Development category: Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Guinea, Gambia, Togo, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Benin and Nigeria. From West Africa, only Ghana and Cape Verde have escaped into Medium Human Development. Of the 15 West African countries Liberia's HDI increased the most, by .030 from .435 to .465. Accordingly its HDI rank increased 5 places, from 181 to 176. These gains were achieved through a reported increase in GNP per capita from $667 in 2017 to $1040 in 2018. A similar accomplishment was noted for Guinea in the 2018 HDR. It's hard to imagine that the people of these countries actually en masse experienced such massive increases in their individual incomes in a single year, so the rise must be due to some special circumstance. This highlights an issue of concern surrounding the HDI. How accurately does it reflect the circumstances of the people from year to year?

It's noticeable (see table below) that just as last year most of the West African countries experienced a rise in their absolute HDI score, albeit modest. The only West African country to record a drop in its HDI was Cape Verde. As the text of the Human Development Report tells us, the poorest countries are experiencing increases in their indicators that should eventually take them out of poverty and these increases are greater than those for the rich countries. According to the HDI, conditions are improving in the world as a whole, as measured by income, health and education indicators. As an example, take Togo, whose HDI increased by .010 to .513 this year. If Togo could repeat this increase for the next four years the .040 increase would take the country to 0.553 and into the ranks of the Medium Human Development. Even more ambitiously, if this performance could be repeated for a further twenty-five years, the total increase in HDI of 25 x 0.010 would take the country's HDI above .800 and into the exalted ranks of the Very High Human Development, along with the USA, UK and Japan! And yet, in the real world, one does not at all get the sense of the West African countries catching up with the rich countries of the West. This paradox is perhaps a flaw in the construction of the Human Development Index, which necessarily limits the highest score to 1.00. The rich countries at the top have very little further room to increase their scores.

The HDI is an apparently sensitive measure of a country's human development, with changes of the order of .1% measurable (.001 out of a maximum of 1). The change in HDI from one year to the next reveals the amount of progress a country has made in developing its human potential. For the 15 West African countries, their absolute score and change in score from 2018 to 2019 is indicated below.

	2019 HDI	Change in HDI from 2018
Cape Verde	0.651	-0.003
Ghana	0.596	+0.004

	2019 HDI	Change in HDI from 2018
Nigeria	0.534	+0.002
Benin	0.520	+0.005
Cote d'Ivoire	0.516	+0.024
Senegal	0.514	+0.009
Togo	0.513	+0.010
Gambia	0.466	+0.006
Guinea	0.466	+0.007
Liberia	0.465	+0.030
Guinea-Bissau	0.461	+0.006
Sierra Leone	0.438	+0.019
Burkina Faso	0.434	+0.011
Mali	0.427	0.0
Niger	0.377	+0.023

In the Very High Human Development category, Norway (0.954, increase of .001), Switzerland (0.946, increase of .002) and Ireland (0.942, increase of .004) occupied the top three positions.