Reconciling Africa’s growth, poverty and inequality trends – growth and poverty project (GAPP)

Despite decades of research and advances in data and methods, measuring poverty and reconciling this with patterns of economic growth remains a complex and contentious issue. UNU-WIDER’s Growth and Poverty Project (GAPP) re-examines Africa’s growth, poverty and inequality trends. The project has three goals.

First, develop new tools to measure monetary poverty in consistent and comparable ways, and make these tools accessible to scholars in Africa and other developing regions.

Secondly, undertake detailed case studies in more than a dozen African countries to measure poverty trends, and 'triangulate' these with other development indicators, such as on non-monetary poverty, demographic changes, macroeconomic trends and external shocks.

Thirdly, develop a macro-micro analytical framework to conduct detailed research in countries where poverty and economic growth trends appear to be inconsistent.