Sudan is an Ldc and Zambia's high Mva doesnt mean it is more industrialized than Kenya.
There is a difference btw Hdi and Ldc; in that the former is used to measure the quality of life in its three dimensions: the gdp per capita, health and life expectancy and education- literacy levels, years of schooling and the quality of the academic attainment.
Ldcs are those countriess marked by high levels of poverty, low infrastructure development, high vulnerability to economic and environmental shocks, low levels of human assets, low industristrialization etc.
A country may be doing well in terms of the Hdi, but that does not make it necessarily a middle income country, given its weaknesses in the other indices. Btw, Eritrea has the best quality health provision in Africa but it still ranks lowly in the Hdi and it is also an Ldc.
Right, sorry Sudan is a LDC.
Kenya is more Industrialized than Zambia? How do you measure Industrialization? The answer is CIP (Competitive Industrial Performance) . Zambia ranks 109 and Kenya ranks 113 (
https://www.unido.org/fileadmin/use...ces/Publications/EBOOK_IDR2016_FULLREPORT.pdf)
A country can choose not to be in LDCs list eg. Ghana chose not to since 1971.
Zimbabwe, is not a LDC and it has the GNI of 857$ per capita, Economic Vulnerability Index of 59 and Human Assets Index of 56.8 all these indicators are below the threshold for graduation, and you need to be over threshold in at least two of these indicators to graduate from LDC list.
Kenya has never been on the list since it was established in 1971, the British left it with many factories to begin with, a better infrastructure and other trimmings (eg. settlers who had a developed agriculture industry) although Kenya would still be characterized as an LDC till 2015 and wouldn't have graduated till around 2021 or 2025 (It would be slotted to graduate same time as Angola and Bhutan/Bangladesh). Tanzania, at that time was experiencing a downturn which climaxed in 1973's oil crisis and had to be on the list.
The problem is, graduation. Graduation from LDCs is vigorously supervised by the UN Committee for Dev. policy in conjunction with UNCTAD and the GNP per capita threshold is 1,035$ which Kenya attained in 2015. Kenya didn't meet the Human Assets Index threshold of 60 and above till 2015 (Kenya has 64.3 and 59.1in 2012).
It takes almost six years of monitoring, followed by announcement and then graduation from LDC list and so far, Botswana is the only sub-Saharan African country that has gone through all those vigorous steps. Kenya and other sub-Saharan countries that are not in LDC, were not in the list in 1971, not because they have what it takes but they had what it took in 1971 and inclusion is as hard as is graduation.
So, basically, Kenya would have qualified in 2015 and probably graduate in 2021 from LDC category. IMF and WB have their own classification and you can't just pick one classification to explain the quality of life of a certain country.As I've always said, and maintain to tell you day in day out "KENYA AND TANZANIA HAVE THE SAME LEVEL OF DEVELOPMENT" this is based on actuarial facts and not blah blah.