text: Charity websites are a good source, such as Oxfam, UNICEF, The Red Cross, Live8, Make Poverty History, etc. You can find these with google.\n\nFor facts and figures, such as average income in each country, number of doctors per head of population, etc, there is the CIA World Fact Book, written by the US Central Intelligence Agency.\n\nWikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has an entry on poverty, including links to more topics and external websites.\n\nYou might think about all the basics of life that we have and they don't, then look up each one in wikipedia, in combination with the word Africa. For example, water, food, shelter, health-care, disease, clothing, etc.\n\nYou could also lookup 'africa' in wikipedia, look at the list of countries and read the entry page for each country to see what their particular problems are.\n\nIf you need to write something on the CAUSES of african poverty, think of all the things that stand in the way of a succesful economy :-\n\nWar (often caused by colonial powers leaving africa divided into countries with several tribal groups that hate each other)\n\nTropical diseases and HIV/AIDS\n\nTrade-barriers (tarrifs and quotos), so that many goods they want to export to the rich countries are too expensive.\n\nPoor credit history, so they can't get loans.\n\nCorrupt/Undemocratic governments.\n\nLack of education.\n\nThe fact they are joining the industrial world 200 years behind the USA and Europe.\n\nLack of clean water and sanitation.\n\nEnviromental damge.\n\nDroughts and other natural disasters.\n\nHigh crime in some countries due to the easy availability of guns from previous wars. This scares off international investors.\n\nLack of phone and internet access.\n\nPoor roads.\n\nHuge distances to sea container ports, through several countries.\n\nDesertification.\n\nThe fact that many other countries see Africa as one place and ignore the whole continent as somewhere too dangerous to invest, when in fact it is many different countries. Think how different Egypt is from South Africa.