The Gap

I get a lot of questions about how poor Burkina is. There are a lot of ways to address this question but, for today here are some statistics to mull over.

The Human Development Index, which essentially ranks countries based on quality of life, currently ranks Canada 4th in the world and Burkina Faso 177th. (There are 182 countries represented in the report).

So what does that mean...?

• 20% of children in Burkina don’t live to see their fifth birthday. The probability of a child passing away before their fifth birthday in Canada is 0.6%.
• 1 in 10 Burkinabé women die in childbirth.
• In Burkina the probability (at birth) of not surviving to age 40 is 26.9% while in Canada the probability of not surviving to age 60 is 7.3%.
• A Burkinabé’s healthy life expectancy at birth is 43 years while a Canadian’s is 75 years.
• The adult illiteracy rate (inability to read or write) is 71.3% in Burkina Faso. 14.6% of Canadians lack functional literacy skills (reading and writing skills that are adequate to cope with the demands of everyday life).
• 23% of the Burkinabé population is not using an improved water source.
• 81.2% of Burkina’s population lives on less than 2$ a day and 56.5% live on less than 1.25$ a day.

Phew! That’s a lot of numbers.

I certainly won't remember all of these statistics but, I don't think that's the point for me. In some ways the point of all these numbers is to to be able to recognize the gap between the rich and the poor. But, I also feel as though it is to begin to recognize that, for the poor, the gap between life and death is narrow.

[The above information is pulled from the 2009 Human Development Report published by the United Nations as well as the WHO country profiles for Canada and Burkina Faso]