Name: How Africa’s Geography Traps it in Endless Poverty
Uploaded: 2026-02-08T17:06:40.000Z
Duration: 54 min 13 s
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It's well known around the world that Africa is by far the poorest continent in the world by just about every kind of metric you want to measure by if you want to look at countries by their nominal GDP per capita, a whopping 24 out of the bottom 30 of them worldwide are all located in Africa.

If you want to look at countries by their Human Development Index score, a full 27 out of the bottom 30 of them worldwide are also all located in Africa.

Africa is the least urbanized of all the world's inhabited continents and is the only continent where majority of people continue to live in rural communities outside of cities.

Only 43% of Africa's population in 2024 live within cities, compared to 53% in Asia, 74% in Europe, 81% in Latin America and the Caribbean, and

People born in Sub Saharan Africa today are expected to live shorter lives than anywhere else in the world, with a life expectancy as recently as 2022 of only about 60 years from birth, multiple decades shorter lives than people born across Asia, Europe and the Americas are expected to enjoy.

And if it isn't the continent's crippling poverty that is the most well known fact in the Western world, it's the frequent wars and conflicts that have been continually fought across Africa for decades now, with no less than five conflicts fought across the continent since the 1960s that each killed more than a million people and more than a dozen others that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

And all of Africa's poverty and conflict is despite the fact that Africa is perhaps the richest continent in the world in terms of natural resources, especially mineral resources.

Nearly half of all the gold ever mined throughout all of human history has come from Africa.

Africa, and about a fifth of global gold production today continues to take place there.

Africa has the largest known reserves in the world of diamonds and platinum, in addition to phosphate rock that's vital for fertilizers, cobalt that's vital for battery production, and

bauxite that is vital for aluminum production.

In addition to some of the world's largest reserves of copper, uranium, oil and natural gas as well, and

The Democratic Republic of the Congo alone, Africa's second largest country, also called the drc, has been estimated to have recoverable mineral resources worth around $24 trillion within its borders at 2023 market prices.

And yet the DRC's entire GDP in 2023 was only a little more than $66 billion, meaning that the resources present in the country are worth more than 360 times the country's current total annual economic output.

Africa's modern poverty is despite this abundance of resource wealth, and

also despite the fact that humanity as a species originated in Africa in the first place, which should have, in theory, given African peoples a generous head start of tens of thousands of years over their cousins who migrated out of Africa and settled in other continents.

It's not a situation that you might really expect at first.

And throughout the past century there have been many, many theories proposed and put forward to attempt and explain all of this, some that have been proposed honestly and some more pseudoscientific and racist that do not merit any further analys.

The truth is, there isn't one single explanation that will easily answer why Africa is so poor today.

There were numerous, maybe even countless, explanations behind it that range from the lasting negative effects of colonialism and the slave trade that were wrought on the continent, to the continued neocolonial exploitation of many African countries into the present, to the rampant corruption that has been endemic in many African societies since the end of the colonial era.

Africa is an enormous and extremely diverse and rich place with a huge amount of history.

It is not a single giant monolith that attempting to explain the entire continent's poverty through just a single lens or from just a single perspective will never satisfactorily give the entire picture.

And trying to give you that whole picture to fully explain Africa's poverty would fill up volumes of books and thousands of pages.

Any attempt to explain Africa's current poverty in any shorter context such as this video, will inherently be an oversimplification and leave a lot of context and nuance out for the sake of time.

Nonetheless, in this video I will be specifically looking at how the geography of the African continent, in my opinion, has severely handicapped and held the continent's peoples back for generations throughout its entire history, from the ancient past right up through the present day, and

why geography has therefore been a major contributor to Africa's chronic poverty that exists today.

First of all, it's important for you to understand how truly, utterly massive a place that Africa really is.

You could fit no less than three United States, including Alaska, within the African continent.

In fact, you could cram in the United States, China, India, Greenland, the uk, France, Germany, Spain, and

most of Eastern Europe all into Africa and still have room left over.

Because of this huge size, the distances involved across the African continent are far greater than most people assume.

You will notice that unlike Eurasia, Africa stretches far longer from the north to the south than it does from the east to the west.

The distance from the northern tip of Africa down to the southern tip is roughly 8,000 kilometers, about the same distance away as Portugal is from Nepal.

Now, because of Africa's length and its location on the Earth's surface, it is also very notably the only one of Earth's continents that straddles the Tropic of Cancer, the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, meaning that it is the only one of Earth's continents that extends fully throughout the entire tropical zone.

The climates that are found throughout Africa vary significantly when you travel from north to south across large distances, but

they vary much less from west to east across much shorter distances from north to south.

You will go from a Mediterranean climate, to a desert climate, to a semi arid climate, to a grassland climate, to a rainforest climate, back to a grassland climate, back to a semi arid climate, before finally returning back to a narrow Mediterranean climate again in the very far south.

These climatic shifts across the continent from north to south are significantly more extreme and variable in smaller distances than the shifts you will find in other continents, like in Eurasia, which stretches more wide west to east than it does tall north to south.

As a result, Eurasian climate zones are significantly larger and more contiguous than they are in Africa, where the climate zones are smaller and more fragmented and splintered.

Moreover, Africa has substantially larger amounts of desert, semi arid and jungle type climates and environments than seen in places like Eurasia, where agriculture and livestock herding is substantially more difficult to perform.

The Sahara Desert in particular, is the world's largest hot desert, and

its location and size has served to isolate the rest of the continent beneath it from the rest of the world for thousands of years.

Now, a region of the continent known as Sub Saharan Africa, the Sahara is an absolutely massive and extremely inhospitable place, coming in at roughly the same size as the entirety of the United States, stretching all the way clear across the continent from west to east.

The presence of the Sahara effectively functions as an unlivable, difficult to traverse over ocean of sand that separates all of the land south of it from the rest of the land in the Old World.

It makes Sub Saharan Africa effectively an island, or a completely separate continent entirely.

And so, across generations of history, as traders, ideas, technology and culture traveled across Eurasia and North Africa from west to east and from east to west, they generally struggled to penetrate through the nearly 2,000 kilometers worth of barren Sahara Desert from all of the lands below.

And even Today, in the 21st century, crossing the Sahara by land is still no easy feat with only a handful of highways that cross it and not a single railway that connects it from north to south, leaving camels as one of the most efficient methods of crossing the Sahara.

Even still today, most people are already pretty familiar with how big of a barrier the Sahara Desert really is in Africa.

But the Sahara is in truth, only the very beginning of how geography has isolated sub Saharan Africa from the rest of the world for generations.

One of the other most peculiar things about the African continent, besides for being home to the world's largest hot desert, is how incredibly smooth the continent's coastlines are.

No matter where you go, throughout Africa's coastlines in the north, the west, the south or the east, you'll largely find plenty of smooth coasts and beautiful beaches.

But you'll struggle to find any good or or even any decent natural harbors to protect ships and conduct trade at.

This is most reflected when comparing the lengths of the African coastline to the lengths of other continental coastlines.

For example, despite Africa being nearly four times larger than Europe is in terms of overall area, the coastline in Europe is about six times longer than the coastline in Africa is.

Because of this, Europe's significantly more jagged and longer coastline contains substantially more inlets and usable natural ports and harbors than are available in Africa.

To put it into even more of an insane perspective, keep in mind that the Chesapeake Bay in the United States, a huge area of enclosed waters that includes access to cities like Washington, D.C.

baltimore and Norfolk, encompasses a coastline length all on its own.

That's equivalent to more than 60% the entire coastline of the whole African continent.

Because of this smoothness of the African continent's coastlines, there is a severe shortage of usable natural harbors to use for protecting ships from the roughness of the open sea, which has handicapped the ability of Africans to conduct maritime trade and project naval power for all of human history.

And if that wasn't enough, a substantial portion of sub Saharan Africa also has very shallow coastal waters as well, which prevent large ships from being able to approach these shallow coasts without grounding themselves.

This forces large merchant ships to conduct trade with large amounts of the Sub Saharan African coastline through the time consuming and expensive way of anchoring offshore and then transporting cargo to and from the coast with smaller vessels that can navigate through the shallower waters without grounding themselves.

Historically, as Arab explorers and traders in the Middle Ages began navigating from Arabia down the east coast of Africa, they didn't encounter a good natural and defensible harbor to use as a trade outpost.

Along Africa's smooth and shallow coastlines.

Until they encountered the island of Nguja, only about 35km off of the African mainland.

It was there, on that island, As a site of a rare sheltered harbor in africa.

Where the arabs established a strategic trade post.

That gradually evolved into the city of zanzibar, A port based around a natural harbor.

That made Zanzibar one of the largest and wealthiest cities.

But the smoothness of Africa's coastlines.

And the lack of very many good natural harbors.

Presents the continent with a problem to trade.

That is only exactly exacerbated by the fact that virtually none of Africa's rivers.

Are actually navigable out to the ocean, Eliminating their ability to facilitate maritime riverine trade.

To understand why this is largely the case, you, have to understand the unique nature Of Africa's elevation.

First, virtually everywhere on the continent Outside of western Africa, the interior will jut up rapidly from the coast, which forms a series of escarpments throughout the rest of the continent.

All throughout the majority of Africa, these high escarpments Create a series of very narrow coastal plains.

That are often no more than only a few dozen kilometers wide.

That are backed up by steep rises in elevation behind them, Creating very small coastal hinterlands.

Where, even in locations With a few good natural harbors, they're still just connected to these narrow coastal hinterlands.

That offer little space for civilization building and trade.

Where natural harbors at Venice and Trieste.

And where natural harbors all along the north coast of Europe.

From Antwerp to Rotterdam to Hamburg to gdask.

Are all directly connected to the great European plain.

And because most of the interior of Africa Is covered by these high plateaus, Nearly the entire continent is more than 300 meters, or 1,000ft above sea level.

And about half of the continent is more than 760 meters, or 25, 500ft above sea level.

And the way that the elevation Rapidly descends down to sea level.