Ideally, therefore, the decoupling measure should focus on resource use per unit of consumption rather than per unit of recorded production in an economy. Such measures are unavailable on an economy- or sector-wide basis, however. Fourth, although these data limitations apply to all economies, in Africa data are particularly inconsistent (Jerven, 2013), so measuring the progress of decoupling is harder still. The production and cleaning processes in the iron and steel, textiles, leather, pulp and paper, and chemical sectors, among others, pose a severe threat to human health and water resources in several African countries.