The Lion's Pride Volume 11 (Winter 2019) | Page 26

Especially for millions of poor families, climate change affects the
developing countries that continue to derive their livelihood from the
land. Global affinities and entanglements also exacerbate these
fluctuations, which means that the consequences of unexpected changes
that appear to be occurring locally may even be felt globally. Bonnet and
Maguire (2009) explain how some of these factors affect people in
Africa:
Apart from a brief improvement in the 1960s, the fifty years
since African independence have seen deterioration in the
population’s living and working conditions. We have lost
count of the number of conferences and reports by
international institutions that, decade after decade, have
sounded the alarm in a bid to halt what has been called
“Africa’s decline.” The most exhaustive of these reports is
without doubt the 464-page document presented to the G8
summit in Gleneagles in July 2005 (Commission for Africa
2005). The problem of Africa was deemed sufficiently
serious to merit an entire chapter in the global report on child
labor presented to the International Labor Conference in June
2006. We must not forget that Africa’s population doubles
every twenty-five years and that children under age fifteen
represent 44 percent of that population. Africa is the
continent with the highest number of working children as a