Introduction

The people of Africa continue their struggle for peace, stability and lasting democracy. The end of the cold war has had a deep impact on sub-Saharan African countries as well as the rest of the world, reviving movements for democracy which were often forgotten in the period after independence. But, in most of these countries, people cannot even earn one dollar a day and continue to live in conditions where one child out of five dies before reaching the age of five, not knowing much about other alternative ways of life because half of them cannot read and thus cannot get information; and where girls cannot attend school because they spend half a day walking to fetch water and firewood. Life expectancy is mostly less than 50, and even this is shrinking due to pandemics such as AIDS. Peace and prosperity are important for these countries in order to realize human life with more dignity, but the actual facts in the continent show that external help is needed for this purpose.