Abstract
Close to half of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa still live in extreme poverty on less than US$1 (PPP — purchasing power parity) a day. The 2004 progress monitoring of the achievement of the first Millennium Development Goal (halving poverty by 2015) shows that hardly any progress has been made since 1990 towards attaining this target in this region of the world, while other regions have seen considerable change (UN, 2004a). This outlook is not reassuring.