Africa which continent

However, in recent years the terrain has started to shift. The rise of other emerging powers such as China, India and Brazil on the continent has not only called into question the privileged relationships that the West has enjoyed in Africa but also put South Africa in direct competition for investments and contracts with its newly found political allies.

Europe and the US, which continue to be key trading partners, are being snubbed through controversial foreign policy stances such as on the International Criminal Court from which the country threatens to withdraw.

Yet, the pandemic continues to take a toll on African lives and has pushed up to 40 million people into extreme poverty. Women, youth, low skill labor and those in the informal sector remain most affected by lack of access to social safety nets and income opportunities. Many countries have seized the opportunity within the crisis to move faster on key reforms and investments that will be crucial for long-term development. The road to recovery will be long and vary significantly across economies and sub-regions.

Our response efforts are focused around four main areas: saving lives, protecting poor people, protecting and creating jobs, and building back better.

Saving Lives: The World Bank has taken fast action to help African countries strengthen their pandemic response and health care systems and is now stepping up its support on vaccine purchase and deployment. With the vaccine roll-out underway in many African countries, ensuring an adequate supply of vaccines is a priority for the region. Protecting poor people: To protect poor and vulnerable citizens and respond to the impact on their livelihoods, the Bank is helping African countries to scale up and adapt social safety net programs and ensure food security by supporting farmers to expand agricultural production as well as sustain food supply chains.

Protecting and creating jobs: Micro, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, which provide the majority of jobs, have been particularly hard hit across the region where informal firms dominate employment.

Public works and urban programs are being launched or scaled up to facilitate job creation in low income communities and to help increase access to livelihood support for extremely poor and vulnerable people like women and the youth.

More than 20 SSA countries in have requested development policy operations or budget support from the Bank to assist them to manage the fiscal impacts of the pandemic.

These operations are focusing on supporting governments to mitigate the effects of the COVID pandemic, and at the same time promoting reforms that will create the conditions for economic recovery. It supports initiatives in favor of climate change adaptation and mitigation and deploys an approach to address the drivers of Fragility, Conflict and Violence. Finally, the World Bank is scaling up its work on regional integration, taking a holistic view of the continent to improve connectivity, leverage economies of scale, and advance collective action to address shared challenges.

Research and analysis : Knowledge is essential for governments to make better policies and institutions to make aid more effective. This paired with strong analytical work by sector can help promote substantive discussions and drive evidence-based policy making around key development issues.

Learn how to enable it here. We use cookies to provide relevant content and ads, to enable certain donation functionality, and to analyze our traffic. In This Article Stereotypes are all too common when it comes to the continent and people of Africa. The truth is that Africa's 54 countries defy generalization.

This is a kilometre 75 mile strip of land which lies between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. Africa is surrounded by the Red Sea and the Suez Canal in the northeast, the warm Indian Ocean to the southeast, the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the icy cold Atlantic Ocean to the west.

The distance from the southernmost tip of Africa at Cape Agulhas to the northernmost tip at Ras ben Sakka in Tunisia is approximately 8 kilometres 5 miles. The distance between the most easterly point at Ras Fun in Somalia and the most westerly point in Cape Verde is approximately 7 kilometres 4 miles.

The smallest country in mainland Africa is the Republic of The Gambia. It is almost completely surrounded by Senegal except for its western coastline along the Atlantic Ocean. Looking at the purchasing gross domestic product GDP of the countries in Africa, the Top 5 richest countries in Africa in were:.

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