21st Century Africa

Bonazah Community Development of Africa (BOCODA)  is A non-profit charity corporation created for the purpose of providing Humanitarian charity support, promoting educational programs and promoting sustainable livelihood initiative amongst the less privilege in African communities.

In the 21st century most Africa countries still records one of the lowest development rate and highest poverty level in the world, with a world’s population of over 7 billion, 805 million people (one in nine people) in the world – do not have enough to eat. 98% of the world’s undernourished people live in developing countries with a total of 214 million people coming from the Sub-Sahara Africa. Statistics from the world hunger projects further states that A third of all childhood death in sub-Saharan Africa is caused by hunger while 66 million primary school-age children attend classes hungry across the developing world, with 23 million in Africa alone.

Despite Africa’s relatively strong economic growth performance over the past decade, many countries in the continent are grappling with several development challenges ranging from food insecurity, high unemployment, poverty and inequality, to commodity dependence, lack of economic transformation, environmental degradation, and low integration of the continent in the global economy. Since the dawn of the new millennium, African Governments and the international community have adopted various initiatives aimed at addressing these development challenges and improving living conditions on the continent. At the continental level, African Heads of State and Government adopted the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), which emphasizes African ownership of the development process and outcome, and calls for interventions in the following priority areas: agriculture and food security, regional integration and infrastructure, climate change and environment, human development, economic governance, and capacity development and women empowerment. At the international level, world leaders adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which called for, among others, a halving of the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015. There are also ongoing efforts by the international community to eliminate and finalize the broad contours of the post-2015 development agenda, within the framework of sustainable development.

While Africa has made some progress in achieving the goals set out in existing development frameworks, overall the continent is yet to realize the broad vision set out in these initiatives. For example, out of the eight MDGs, the continent is on track to achieve only three goals by the 2015 deadline, namely: achieving universal primary education (MDG 2), promoting gender equality and empowering women (MDG 3), and combating HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and other diseases (MDG 6). Furthermore, the continent is still grappling with the problem of extreme hunger and poverty, and unemployment and inequality have increased over the past decade (United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) et al., 2013). These findings, based on analysis of macroeconomic data, have also been corroborated by the results of recent surveys. For example, a survey by Afro barometer conducted in 34 African countries between October 2011 and June 2013 indicates that poverty rates in sub-Saharan Africa have gone down but that the number of people in poverty has increased despite a decade of relatively high growth. Reversing this trend is a challenge that African policymakers have to address effectively in the short to medium term to enhance the likelihood of achieving the African Union’s vision of an integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa.

All this cannot be achieves without the help of the civil society and international partners. BOCODA in its vision believes that Africa needs the efforts of its people to grow the development process of its continents, for that reason BOCODA was created to reach out to the local grassroots inhabitants in Africa and empowered them to contribute to the development of Africa. In our analyses we narrowed down our interventions to four program areas that will effectively initiate community participation to both political, economic and environment growth and thereby reducing poverty. Our areas of interventions are:

Educational promotion
Livelihood promotion
Environmental sustainability
Basic needs support program