A lot has been said about Yemen since the attempted bomb­ing of an air­plane by an Yemeni national on Christ­mas Day. Yemen has a sim­i­lar poverty sit­u­a­tion as most of Africa, yet receives less aid per per­son than other African coun­tries. Many pol­icy advis­ers warn the US that they must address the issue of poverty in Yemen instead of sim­ply fight­ing al-Qaeda.

From Bloomberg News, writer Henry Meyer presents an arti­cle full of facts and fig­ures about inter­na­tional aid going into Yemen.

A West­ern fail­ure to address Yemen’s eco­nomic and social weak­nesses will exac­er­bate the threat from al-Qaeda in the poor­est Arab nation, said Gre­gory Johnsen, a Yemen scholar at Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity in New Jer­sey. Yemen gets about one-third the for­eign aid accorded to equally poor parts of Asia and Africa on a per capita basis.

“You can’t focus only on killing peo­ple and not on what turns them into al-Qaeda sup­port­ers,” said Mustafa Alani, a secu­rity expert at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center.

About 40 per­cent of Yemen’s pop­u­la­tion, which is expected to almost dou­ble by 2030 to 40 mil­lion, lives on less than $2 a day, says the U.K. Depart­ment for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment. For­eign aid comes to $12 a year for each Yemeni, com­pared with an aver­age of $33 in African and Asian nations suf­fer­ing sim­i­lar lev­els of poverty, the depart­ment says.
…

Yemen is in need of devel­op­ment help as the con­flict with Mus­lim Shi­ite rebels on the bor­der with Saudi Ara­bia exac­er­bates its eco­nomic trou­bles. Christo­pher Boucek, a Yemen expert at the Washington-based Carnegie Endow­ment for Inter­na­tional Peace, esti­mates that the gov­ern­ment is spend­ing $200 mil­lion a month on the war.

In the province of Amran, refugees have crowded into six schools in one moun­tain val­ley near the con­flict zone. The 1,200 chil­dren have been unable to go to class since Sep­tem­ber, said Luci­enne Maas, coun­try pro­gram direc­tor for U.K.-based char­ity Save the Chil­dren. More than 175,000 refugees have fled the fight­ing, accord­ing to the United Nations.

In rural areas, in which 70 per­cent of Yemen’s pop­u­la­tion lives, only 20 per­cent of houses get elec­tric­ity, accord­ing to the U.S. Trade Devel­op­ment Agency. Less than half of the rural pop­u­la­tion has access to clean drink­ing water.

Like

Unlike