Information and Communication Technologies for Development

I stole this from LeAnne. Insightful, profound, grounded. . . really a game-changing blog post.

I decided to browse the CIA World Factbook on Malawi. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mi.html
Almost half the population is between the ages of 0-14, and the other half is between 15-64 years old. They gave the median age to be 17 years old, which is radically different from the US and other countries that I've experienced thus far. The infant mortality rate is almost 1 out of 10 births. The life expectancy is about 43 years old. If you think about if that were the case in the US, that would be like saying your parents weren't alive for your high school years (approximating).

I was fairly impressed with the literacy rate. 76% of males can read, and 50% of females. To me, that seems pretty good in such a poor nation. I was also very surprised by the division of labor present in the country; only 36% are involved in agriculture, whereas 45% are in services and 19% in industry. I thought agriculture was more prominent by FAR, but I guess this is only the case in the vicinity of the Beehive school that we are working with. In addition, the CIA Factbook said that 53% of the population is below the poverty line, but I'm curious as to what defines this poverty line. If it's based on the US poverty line, then that is a very different view of what poverty is. Malawian's live with poverty in a very different way from the wealthy United States.

Malawi has a lot of debt, and no oil or natural gas reserves that it can use to boost its economy. Oil makes the world go 'round, so it is no wonder that the country struggles. Without oil it is difficult to compete.

In the late 1990s, according to economywatch.com, as well as several other sources, Malawi was about the 4th-poorest country in the world, behind only Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Burundi. The criteria for determining the world's poorest country varies based on several criteria, not merely GDP.

The United Nations has categorized the poorest countries of the world based on three major criteria:
1. The annual gross domestic product below $900 per capita
2. Quality of life that is a function of life expectancy at birth, per capita calorie intake, primary and secondary school secondary enrollment rates and adult literacy rate.
3. Economic vulnerability which mainly depends on the stability in agricultural production, export and import.

Today, it's status has slightly improved, to where now it is in the poorest 15:
http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/

Income/GDP is in no way the only indicator of a country's poverty level. The United Nations has implemented the Human Development Indicator (HDI) to determine a country's status. The HDI was developed in 1990, and one of its inventors was a Nobel Prize winner. According to the United Nations Development Programme, "Each year since 1990 the Human Development Report has published the human development index (HDI) which looks beyond GDP to a broader definition of well-being. The HDI provides a composite measure of three dimensions of human development: living a long and healthy life (measured by life expectancy), being educated (measured by adult literacy and enrolment at the primary, secondary and tertiary level) and having a decent standard of living (measured by purchasing power parity, PPP, income). The index is not in any sense a comprehensive measure of human development. It does not, for example, include important indicators such as gender or income inequality and more difficult to measure indicators like respect for human rights and political freedoms. What it does provide is a broadened prism for viewing human progress and the complex relationship between income and well-being."

The HDI for Malawi is 0.437, which gives the country a rank of 164th out of 177 countries with data.

The HDI measures the average progress of a country in human development. The Human Poverty Index for developing countries (HPI-1), focuses on the proportion of people below a threshold level in the same dimensions of human development as the human development index - living a long and healthy life, having access to education, and a decent standard of living. By looking beyond income deprivation, the HPI-1 represents a multi-dimensional alternative to the $1 a day (PPP US$) poverty measure.

The HPI-1 value of 36.7 for Malawi, ranks 79th among 108 developing countries for which the index has been calculated.

The HPI-1 measures severe deprivation in health by the proportion of people who are not expected to survive age 40. Education is measured by the adult illiteracy rate. And a decent standard of living is measured by the unweighted average of people without access to an improved water source and the proportion of children under age 5 who are underweight for their age.