HDI

To calculate HDI, they look in to how long and healthy the average life is in the country, how educated the country is, and whether or not the country has a decent standard of living. I notice that higher HDIs tend to be more developed countries. I know that the website states that you cannot tell if a country is developed by whether it has a high or low HDI, but I still think that it has an impact on it. To go along with that, the poorer populations tend to be on the low HDI side. This is because they can't afford to have good health care to help people live longer, they don't have as many people entered into the school systems, and most families are very poor with a low standard of living. Another pattern I've noticed is that Southwest Asia and North Africa tend to have a lot of countries on the medium HDI list. I think that the Sub-Saharan Africa is ranked so low on the HDI list because they are a poor area. As I mentioned above, they can't afford to have superior health care. They can't afford to have vaccines and medications to fight of things like malaria. Also, you have to pay to go to schools in a lot of places in the Sub-Saharan Africa. Many families have a lot of children and can't afford to send all of them to school. Sometimes a family of 10 can only send 2 of their children to school because that's all they can handle. Lastly, is the standard of living. Most people in Africa live in little huts, and in Rwanda, many people live on less than a dollar a day. For these reasons, and more, is why most of Sub-Saharan Africa is ranked on the low end of the HDI.