Niger - A Case of the Tuareg Blues

Niger should really grab more headlines.

Five times the size of the United Kingdom, it is one of the poorest nations on earth. The statistics are pretty grim – a 2.9% population growth; child mortality worse than Afghanistan; less than a third of the people are literate: boys spend on average five years in school; girls, just three. Two-thirds of people live beneath the poverty line, 85% on less than $2 a day. Half of the government budget derives from donor aid.

Classified by the UN as the world’s least developed country, its location hardly helps. Niger is handicapped by its landlocked position, desert terrain and environmental degradation. Drought cycles and desertification have undercut the economy and with record temperatures of 48.2°C (118.8°F) in Bilma on June 23 2010, there is no sign of any relief.

Since independence from France in 1960, long periods of military rule have devastated the country. Five constitutions and three military juntas later, little has changed. Add to this catastrophic famines (1974, 1984, 2005 and now another in 2010) and you begin to get a sense of how bleak the outlook is for this country.

Forced to eat leaves, wild berries and collect grain from ant hills, 8 million people (more than half the population), are suffering from malnutrition, 3 million of which are on the brink of starvation. Rains and crops failed last year. Take the village of Dailli as an example. Erratic rainfall and a protracted drought led to the complete failure of its cereal production. Elsewhere, it’s a similar story. The absence of regular rainfall throughout 2009 has led to poor harvests, lack of grazing for animals and food reserves exhausted. The result? Soaring food prices and crisis.

Unless we need to exploit their uranium for our nuclear power industry or see how far on their oil production is, we’re really not interested. As usual, West Africa is not very high on the developed world’s priority list.