Inequality in sub-Saharan Africa: A Review Paper

Very little attention has been paid to African inequality dynamics in high-profile international discussions of changing global inequality despite the fact that African dynamics will become increasingly important to the global inequality discussion. Within the continent, recent years have seen distributional issues becoming more central because of the importance of inequality in inclusive growth. Therefore, the review takes stock of what we can say about African inequality both to promote better analysis and better policymaking in addressing inequality in Africa. Our assessment of the drivers of inequality in Africa paid particular attention to the themes of intra-household inequality and gender and also inequality of opportunity and social mobility in Africa. The complexities of household formation and composition, for example the high frequency of polygamous households in some countries, sit right at the heart of access to resources and of the accurate assessment of inequality in any African context. African inequality analysis always requires that analytic attention be devoted to both rural and urban contexts and the linkages between them.