text: where can i learn and get information on poverty in africa for my research project?????????   charity websites are a good source, such as oxfam, unicef, the red cross, live8, make poverty history, etc. you can find these with google.  for facts and figures, such as average income in each country, number of doctors per head of population, etc, there is the cia world fact book, written by the us central intelligence agency.  wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has an entry on poverty, including links to more topics and external websites.  you might think about all the basics of life that we have and they don't, then look up each one in wikipedia, in combination with the word africa. for example, water, food, shelter, health-care, disease, clothing, etc.  you could also lookup 'africa' in wikipedia, look at the list of countries and read the entry page for each country to see what their particular problems are.  if you need to write something on the causes of african poverty, think of all the things that stand in the way of a succesful economy :-  war (often caused by colonial powers leaving africa divided into countries with several tribal groups that hate each other)  tropical diseases and hiv/aids  trade-barriers (tarrifs and quotos), so that many goods they want to export to the rich countries are too expensive.  poor credit history, so they can't get loans.  corrupt/undemocratic governments.  lack of education.  the fact they are joining the industrial world 200 years behind the usa and europe.  lack of clean water and sanitation.  enviromental damge.  droughts and other natural disasters.  high crime in some countries due to the easy availability of guns from previous wars. this scares off international investors.  lack of phone and internet access.  poor roads.  huge distances to sea container ports, through several countries.  desertification.  the fact that many other countries see africa as one place and ignore the whole continent as somewhere too dangerous to invest, when in fact it is many different countries. think how different egypt is from south africa.