The global financial crisis would pose a greater danger of "human crisis" for Africa, Shanta Devarajan, World Bank's Chief Economist on Africa, said in Nigerian capital Abuja on Saturday.

Devarajan, who gave the warning in a statement pasted on the World Bank's website, said since Africa had already "caught the flu of the global financial crisis," it would likely experience a deceleration.

He said although Africa was spared the first-round effects of banking failures, it is already facing the second-round impacts of declining capital flows, slowing remittances, stagnating foreign aid, falling commodity prices and export revenues.

"The continent will surely experience a deceleration in growth. And if history is a guide, this deceleration will have an impact on human development," he said.

Devarajan said his colleague at the World Bank, Justin Lin, had earlier warned against allowing the global financial crisis became a human crisis.

According to him, an exhaustive study of growth acceleration and decelerations by Jorge Arbache and John Page show that the impact on human development will be asymmetric.

"Child mortality, for instance, rises during decelerations, but hardly falls during acceleration. Primary school completion rates are substantially lower in countries experiencing growth decelerations, as is life expectancy," he said.

According to the News Agency of Nigeria, the governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Chukwuma Soludo, had admitted that Nigeria was vulnerable to the financial crisis. Economic experts in Nigeria have blamed the melt down in the capital market, gradual depletion of the foreign reserve and the falling crude oil prices on effects of the global financial crisis.