This is what Africa has in abundance, space, almost 12 million square miles

This is what Africa has in abundance, space, almost 12 million square miles of desert, savanna, coastline, and people, 700 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 11% of the planets population, more than half of them children, and almost all of them poor. This too is what Africa has in abundance, poverty. Sub-Saharan Africa is the poorest region in the world, almost half the people here live on less than 65 cents a day, not enough money, not enough food. One in throe Africans is undernourished, malnutrition is a major course of child mortality here, one in five children die before reaching the age of five. So many lives are short, average life expectancy for an African is just over 45 years, often less for women, who die bearing children, die of AIDS. Sub-Saharan Africa has just over 10% of the world’s population, but close to 70% of all people living with HIV, more than 29 million people. 58% of them, women. More than 16 million Africans have already died of AIDS, that’s the population of Hong Kong, Denmark and Ireland combined. 12 million children have been orphaned by AIDS, many of them like these in Uganda HIV positive. HIV, AIDS is only one disease plaguing Africa. Malaria kills almost a million Africans a year. Measles kills more than a thousand children every day. That’s one child nearly every minute. Measles can be prevented by vaccines, but in sub-Saharan Africa only about a half of all children are immunized during the first year of life. A suspension of immunization campaigns in Nigeria let polio, which was nearly eradicated in the world, takes route again, spread to 17 previously polio-free countries. There is no vaccine for diarrheal disease; the best prevention is clean water, which more than 300 million Africans don’t have. Water of any kind is often in short supply, or so distant, that the working years of many lives are spent hauling water. Work for most is hard. 75% of Africans live inland, labour as farmers, grow what they can where they can, and get it to market however they can. Across sub-Saharan Africa economic growth is low, slow, and economies and currencies are unstable. Corruption is another kind of plague here. And so is war. One in every five Africans lives in a society severely disrupted by violence, armed conflict has ruptured nearly half of all the countries in sub-Saharan Africa in the past 5 years. Most horribly in Liberia, Congo, Darfur, and Sudan. Uncounted millions have been wounded, traumatized, displaced. Without stability and good government progress is limited, so is the willingness of donors to give and investors to invest to bring the vast majority of Africans into the modern world. To improve education, 41% of Africans cannot read or write, as many as half of all African children never finish elementary school. Even those who complete high school are ill-equipped to be part of a 21st-century work force, or the technological age. Less than one percent of the African population has a computer; only one in forty owns a telephone. Yet Africa has great untapped wealth beneath the surface, literally in minerals, gold, cobalt, copper, diamonds and in oil. Sub-Saharan African countries will earn more than 200 billion dollars in oil revenues over the next decade alone. And Africa has incalculable wealth in its people, who are among the most perseverant and resilient on Earth, who want and have fought for freedom from tyranny, and in a growing number of African countries free elections.