The African Inequality Review – closing the knowledge gap on inequality in Africa at a critical moment

By Andrew Dabalen, Francisco H. G. Ferreira, Patricia Justino, Murray Leibbrandt, and Rodrigo Oliveira

The contemporary global order is at a crossroads. We are entering an era in which shocks are no longer exceptional events but defining features of the global economy. Climate change, conflict, debt, food insecurity, and geopolitical fragmentation are converging in ways that make crises more global, less predictable, and harder to contain. Yet, the international system is moving in the opposite direction: aid budgets are shrinking, and the multilateral institutions built to cushion countries against shared risks are being weakened.

These global shocks do not fall evenly. Their effects are often felt most sharply in countries and communities with the least fiscal space, weaker buffers, and greater exposure to climate, commodity, and financing risks – making inequality one of the defining challenges of our times. Against this backdrop, African countries cannot afford to wait for a revival of global support that may not come quickly, or at the scale required. As shocks become more global and uncertainty rises, African governments will increasingly have to rely on their own institutions, resources, and policy choices to confront these challenges, even as fiscal pressures intensify. This creates difficult trade-offs over taxation, public spending, social protection, education, climate adaptation, and employment policy.
 

Better evidence on inequality is therefore not a technical luxury but a political and economic necessity: it is essential for identifying which policies can expand opportunity, protect vulnerable groups, and sustain inclusive development in an era of constrained resources and rising risk.

These choices need to be made with a clear understanding of who is most affected, by which shocks, and through which channels. Otherwise, they risk deepening existing inequalities rather than reducing them. This matters not only for Africa itself, but increasingly for the global economy, as much of future global population and labour force growth will take place across the continent.

Yet, the places where inequality may be changing most rapidly are often those where it is least well measured. This is especially true in Africa, where the evidence base on inequality remains thinner than in any other region. Data are often irregular, incomplete, or difficult to compare across countries and over time, leaving major gaps in what we know about the scale, drivers, and consequences of inequality. This weakens the ability of governments and their partners to design policies that expand opportunity, protect vulnerable groups, and support inclusive development. 

Addressing inequality requires stronger data, deeper analysis, and closer connections between research and policy, so that scarce public resources can be directed where they are most needed and where they can have the greatest impact.

A multi-country initiative to close critical gaps

The African Inequality Review (AIR) is a multi-country research and policy initiative designed to generate new, comparable evidence on inequality across Africa and connect that evidence to policy decision-making processes.

AIR is led jointly by the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research at the University of Cape Town, South Africa; the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, UK; the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER); and the World Bank. AIR is a multi-year initiative that brings together leading African and international researchers to consolidate existing evidence and generate new knowledge on the levels, trends, causes and consequences of inequality in Africa. The initiative is further guided by a high-level expert panel, bringing together prominent scholars in inequality and development to help shape the research agenda, ensure academic rigour, and strengthen policy relevance.

AIR builds on the experience of the Deaton Review and the Latin American and Caribbean Inequality Review (LACIR), and will commission original research to address critical gaps in inequality analysis, combining cross-country work with targeted country studies where evidence gaps remain significant.

This approach combines cross-country comparability with attention to national contexts, reflecting a central challenge in inequality research: the need to balance comparability across countries with sensitivity to national contexts.

AIR will produce two main types of outputs: high-quality academic research and policy-oriented materials designed to support decision-making at national and continental levels. An open web resource will be developed linking inequality datasets across Africa, which will strengthen the accessibility and usability of evidence for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. It will also stimulate more research on African inequality, particularly from African researchers.

Why this matters now

At a time of rising global fragmentation, fiscal pressure, and uncertainty, African governments face increasingly difficult choices about how to protect vulnerable groups, expand opportunity, and sustain inclusive development. However, these choices are being made in contexts where evidence on inequality is still too limited, too fragmented, and too difficult to compare across countries. This makes it harder to understand how inequality is changing, who is being left behind, and which policies are most likely to make a difference.

AIR responds directly to this challenge. It is part of a broader global effort to improve how inequality is studied and addressed across countries and contexts, ensuring that Africa is not treated as peripheral to that agenda. By generating reliable data, analytically rigorous research, and policy-relevant evidence grounded in African realities, AIR will help place Africa at the centre of global debates on inequality and inclusive development. Its purpose is not only to document inequality more accurately, but to support better policy decisions about how to reduce it. Visit the AIR website.

Andrew Dabalen is the World Bank's Africa Region Chief Economist.
Francisco H. G. Ferreira is the Amartya Sen Professor of Inequality Studies at the London School of Economics, where he is also Director of the International Inequalities Institute.
Patricia Justino is the Director of UNU-WIDER.
Murray Leibbrandt is professor emeritus at the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town, and co-director of the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research.
Rodrigo Oliveira is Research Associate at UNU-WIDER.