Since 1990, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), has compiled an annual report to show the level of development in various countries of the world, across all social strata. A new Regional Human Development Report has emerged to analyse the global report from the African perspective. Africa currently contains 34 of the 49 Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in the world, with 300 million persons, or over 45 percent of the continent's population living below the poverty line. And according to the last Global Human Development Report (2002), 29 countries out of the 36 with a low Human Development Index (HDI) in the world are in Africa.