Africa is one of the five parts of the world, and the third in geographical size; nevertheless, it’s the most forgotten continent.
We know more than three thousand different ethnic groups in the continent. The big family is the basic social unity in the most of the regions, and it’s managed through clans and lineages. They speak more than thousand languages, but only fifty break five hundred thousand speakers.

The life expectancy at the moment of the birth is pinned on forty-nine years old, even if the perspectives change dramatically depending on the countries. The African population evolution remains on its way up every year, according to the UN studies.  The birth rate and the death rate of the African continent are at the top of the worldwide context.
The huge quantity of people affected by the extreme poverty and relative proximity of those countries to prosperous territories belonging to European states give a special drama to the life conditions that the inhabitants of this part of the Earth suffer. The 41% of the population was poor in 1981; ten years later, the percentage came to the 46%.

We can’t talk about Africa without mentioning the European colonization. In the international economic angle, both the foreign demand of some agricultural and mineral products and the domestic migration of workers rose. Crops and European technology were brought, and a system of economy of exchange producing the resulting dependences of the worldwide market, the deterioration of prices and of the change trade was developed; and, about all, had provoked the appearance of the foreign debt and the chronic deficit of the balance of trade. Between 1970 and 2002, the African continent received a bank loan of 540 thousand millions of dollars, of which they only repaid 50 thousand millions. Nowadays, the whole African economics can be described as vulnerable and fragile.

The domestic problems of the countries weaken the States, make the difficulties to face up to the challenges of the globalization even worse, and the doors of the foreign market are closed for them. The spectre of the civil wars and ethnic and tribal conflicts that devastate the continent, intensified by the brutal competition to seize not many resources available, makes that warlords were strong – predators allied to the arms dealer and the trafficker, to the banks and to the multinationals- and deprive the inhabitants of the African States of any prospect of progress, eliminating the faintest trust that the institutions, non authenticated, could bring some useful service.

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