Africa one of the most beautiful continents given to humans on earth.
Although Africa's abundant natural resources, Africa remains the world's poorest and most underdeveloped continent, due to a variety of causes that may include the spread of deadly diseases and viruses, corrupt governments that have often committed serious human rights violations, failed central planning, high levels of illiteracy, lack of access to foreign capital, and frequent tribal and military conflict (ranging from guerrilla warfare to genocide). According to the United Nations' Human Development Report in 2003, the bottom 25 ranked nations were all African.
Africa's poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition and inadequate water supply and sanitation, as well as poor health, affect a large proportion of the people who reside in the African continent.
Some 50% of the population of Africa living in poverty in 1981 (200 million people. The average poor person in sub-Saharan Africa is estimated to live on only 70 cents per day, and was poorer in 2003 than he or she was in 1973 indicating increasing poverty in some areas in Africa. Some of it is attributed to unsuccessful economic liberalization programs spearheaded by foreign companies and governments, but other studies and reports have cited bad domestic government policies more than external factors.
Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km (11.7 million sq mi), it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area. With a billion people in 61 territories, it accounts for about 14.8% of the World's human population.
Africa is widely regarded within the scientific community to be the origin of humans and the Hominidae tree (great apes).
Slave trade
Slavery has been practiced in Africa, as well as other places, throughout recorded history.
Between the seventh and twentieth centuries, Arab slave trade took 18 million slaves from Africa via trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean routes. Between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the Atlantic slave trade took 7-12 million slaves to the New World.
In Africa The gradual decline of slave-trading, prompted by a lack of demand for slaves in the New World, increasing anti-slavery legislation in Europe and America, and the British navy's increasing presence off the West African coast, obliged African states to adopt new economies. Between 1808 and 1860, the British West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard. Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers. The largest powers of West Africa: the Asante Confederacy, the Kingdom of Dahomey, and the Oyo Empire, adopted different ways of adapting to the shift. Asante and Dahomey concentrated on the development of "legitimate commerce" in the form of palm oil, cocoa, timber and gold, forming the bedrock of West Africa's modern export trade. The Oyo Empire, unable to adapt, collapsed into civil wars.