Niger

I have a student from Niger, a country which I don't know anything about. From the WDI, not a very nice graph below. It is the GDP per capita in 2005 US$. 

He said the problem is uranium - Niger produces around 8% of world production. And from an article by Rasmus Kløcker Larsen in World Development

The role of development cooperation in fostering improved environmental governance of extractive industries in African countries exposed to the expanding global uranium frontier remains ambiguous. With primary data, this paper demonstrates how foreign aid to Niger has ignored grievances on grave environmental impacts and rampant institutional failures while a crisis discourse on desertification and food insecurity diverts attention from geopolitical interests in mineral wealth. We argue that aid delivery remains insufficient to address structural deficiencies cemented by decades of investment-friendly ‘politics of mining’ and conclude that domestic reforms must be backed by stronger transnational accountability mechanisms to overcome corporate impunity.