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The UK�s first mixed race Cabinet Minister, Paul Yaw Boateng, says sustained growth alone cannot uproot Africa from the abyss of extreme poverty. Lord Boateng, a member of the British Labour Party, and former Member of Parliament for Brent South told a conference on inequality in Accra, that: �Despite real progress in the fight against poverty during the last decade, poverty on this Continent remains unacceptably high and the pace of reduction unacceptably slow.� According to him, �almost one out of every two Africans live in extreme poverty today.� He adds that: �On the most optimistic of scenarios, with growth rates at a level that has never historically been achieved before, that rate will fall to between 16 and 30 percent living in extreme poverty by 2013.� Lord Boateng however pointed out that: �Under any plausible scenario most of the world�s poor people by 2030 will still live in Africa.� �So it�s clear that sustained growth is a necessary, but not sufficient reality to meet the challenge of accelerating poverty reduction in Africa.� �The region�s high inequality weighs down on the growth elasticity of poverty estimated at around -0.7 as compared to -0.2 in the rest of the developing world excluding China and it hinders the conversion of growth into poverty reduction,� Lord Boateng noted.