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The Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire) has a long and intense history of facing hardships. Though the citizens gained independence from the French in 1960 after being colonized for roughly 67 years, they still face a countless number of economic, social and political issues. The people of the Ivory Coast must come together with the government in order to resolve the issues and better their countrys future. Like in most developing countries, a prominent political issue that the Ivory Coast faces is corruption in the government.
The leaders’ of the Ivory Coast are every thing but eaders. They are incompetent, not trustworthy, and genuinely do not care to govern the country in the interest of the common good of the citizens. (http:// mw. ‘. africaw. com/) In 2011 the World Bank conducted a study with the intention of ranking the most corrupt countries in order, it was found that in Africa the Ivory Coast was ranked number 38 out of 49 African countries. In 2010, transparency International ranked it 130th out of 176 countries in 2011 in its Corruption Perceptions Index.
The government has a tendency to misuse grants that are given to hem in order to better their country which contributes to the corruption that their country faces today. The Ivorians have experienced a great deal of suffering due to corruption including destroyed regions and deaths in their families. (economist. com) The media in the Ivory Coast is beginning to create advertisements in order to make everyone aware of corruption and how it is negatively affecting the citizens of Cote d’Ivoire.
In addition to this an American government agency committee entitled “Millennium Challenge Corporation” (MCC) that aids poor countries recover from overty, this committee will attempt to aid the Ivory Coast once they meet certain benchmark requirements, with one dominant requirement being to invest in the people and decrease corruption. (http://www. economist. com/) Cote d’Ivoire is blessed with an abundant amount of natural resources which helps stimulate their economy, but with such a low literacy rate in their country, it is nearly impossible for everyone to prosper and benefit from these resources.
The education of a nation drastically affects their progress economically, because ignorance leads to bad ecisions. By having a literacy rate of 48. 7% in males and about 38. 6% in females (africaw. com), the Ivory Coast will remain in a state of an unstable economy unless their education improves. Their low literacy rate means that they do not have a sufficient amount of people who are able to aid in creating ways to make use of their natural resources that would improve their economy with stability.
Low education also hurts the Ivorians economically because most women do not use contraceptives during intercourse, which leads to many pregnancies occurring in women that are ot prepared to have children. With unprepared births comes poverty because women that are uneducated are more likely to be poor and have the responsibility of not only taking care of themselves, but their children as well. According to africaw. com The Ivory Coast is one of the poorest countries in the world with about 50% of the country living below the poverty line.
Their literacy rates are worse than that of most African countries, which is why their rate of teenage pregnancy and HIW AIDS is significantly high (because they are ignorant to the negative consequences of ases in the Ivory Coast has led to many deaths among their citizens. This disease spreads to citizens in various ways: mother-to-child, unprotected sexual intercourse, and quickly occurs in key populations of individuals including “men who have sex with men (MSM), sex workers and people who inject drugs. (aidsalliance. org) The Ivorians dying in large amounts from HIVI AIDS serves as a major issue because it creates an imbalance in the population pyramid. It is bottom heavy meaning there is a significant amount of young people compared to the amount of old people. This ffects the country negatively because having too many young children and not enough adults has a negative correlation with progress in the work force. http://www. coopami. rg/en/countries/countries_partners/cote_ivoire/ country_description/index. htm The rapid spread of AIDS in the Ivory Coast haphazardly occurred because there were initially two AID cases reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1985 (http://www. ncbi. nlm. nih. gov) and reached its highest point in November of 1996 when the WHO reported 31,963 case which put Cote d’Ivoire in the top ten as the seventh country with the highest number of eported cases of this horrific disease. (unesco. rg) Studies have shown that the adult population of citizens between ages 20 to 29 years old are the most affected by HIVI AIDS, and “although it is difficult now to forecast the dynamics of the epidemic in C????te d’Ivoire because of the multitude and complexity of factors to be taken into account (Garenne, 1996), the increase in HIV prevalence among pregnant women in Abidjan over the years is particularly worrying. ” These numbers are appalling in the way that they relate to the citizens in the Ivory Coast, because when affected mothers ave children, the children will then be born with HIV and continue the spread of this deleterious disease.
The spread of HIVI AIDS essentially serves as a gender issue primarily because the disease is more prominent in women than men. According to unaids. org the chances of women being HIV positive is eight times greater than men. This wide gender gap is prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa because of gender-based violence. Women are not economically independent from older men, therefore they must rely on them for survival which unfortunately increases their chances of getting HIV/AIDS because of their participation of sexual intercourse with these men.
Older men tend to have had multiple sex partners and as a result they tend to spread HIW AIDS to women. Women are also at greater risk to having this disease because they have a greater biological susceptibility, meaning that “the greater exposed surface area in the female genital tract compared to the male genital tract, higher concentrations of HIV in seminal fluids than in vaginal fluids, the larger amount of semen than vaginal fluids exchanged during intercourse, and greater potential for njury to the cell wall during intercourse for women compared to men (Moss et al. 991; Pettifor et al. 2004). ” (Hertog) The physical aspects and fluids of a woman’s vagina causes her to have a greater chance of receiving the disease through intercourse than a man would therefore women are more likely to suffer from this disease. With education, the spread of HIV/AIDS would decrease dramatically. However in the Ivory Coast most students specifically females dropout at a young age because of pregnancy. Because the majority of citizens lack an education, in the