Poverty in Angola has worsened to over 54% – government

LUANDA, Angola 

The Angolan government said on Friday that poverty in the country had “worsened to over 54 percent,” mainly due to “difficulties imposed by Covid-19,” which are added to “excessive rains, drought and other calamities.

Minister of the Economy, Sérgio Santos, said there has been an “increase in the number of people in vulnerable conditions in the country,” but data on poverty in Angola is being constantly updated.

“The most recent data on poverty, published by the INE [National Statistics Institute], gave a worrying poverty level in Angola of around 54 percent, we know that this figure may have worsened, particularly over the last year,” he said.

According to Sérgio Santos, the pandemic contributed to the “increased level of vulnerability” of many families in the country, who lost their income, aggravated by “worrying situations such as excess rainfall or the lack of it.

The “natural disasters may also have taken income away from many families, so this data must be constantly updated,” he said.

The Angolan minister was speaking at the end of a ceremony to present the programme on “Strengthening Synergies between Social Protection and Public Finance Management,” with a budget of 1.8 million euros, funded by the European Union (EU).

He said that the programme aims to improve the living conditions of Angolans, because the “level of vulnerability in the country is still high,” and with the Covid-19 crisis and other situations, the vulnerable population has been increasing.

“That is why we want to thank our development partners, because the main concern of our government is with social welfare to improve the living conditions of Angolans,” he noted.

The programme launched today in Luanda, which will be implemented by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), aims to strengthen the capacity of public institutions to increase the budget and improve the provision of social protection services in Angola.

Sérgio Santos reiterated the Angolan government’s gratitude to the United Nations and the EU “at this moment which is difficult for all the countries in the world”.

The European Union’s funding envelope “is earmarked for eight countries in the world, Angola was selected as a country concerned with social development, aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals.

The “improvement of synergies” between the various ministerial departments dedicated to the three pillars of social protection in Angola, namely basic social protection, social security and complementary social protection, are among the “immediate actions” to be developed.

One of the concrete products of this synergy, Sérgio Santos stressed, will be improved statistics.

“Therefore, for the beneficiaries of the social programmes, we want to promote greater digitalisation, training of the technicians who work with social protection and better alignment of the programmes in order to optimise the few resources we have,” he concluded.