Poverty

Poverty occurs around the globe, but people in developing countries experience poverty on a different scale. Instead of the exception, poverty is the norm.

“Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit.”
–Eli Khamarov

For example, children are not just coming to school hungry; many don’t come to school, period. Instead of missing birthday parties, millions of children do not reach their fifth birthday. Exploitation of children is widespread, and children are often used as laborers or soldiers. People are not just suffering from sickness; they are dying from preventable diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria.

Ultimately it means that people don’t have what they need to meet their basic needs, including food, shelter and clean water.

The Facts Paint the Picture:

  • Almost half the world—close to three billion people—struggle to survive on less than $2 a day.
  • One-third of deaths—some 18 million people a year, or 50,000 per day—are due to poverty-related causes.
  • 600 million of the world’s children live in absolute poverty.
  • More than 815 million people in developing countries are hungry.
  • Someone dies of starvation every 3.6 seconds. Most of these deaths are children under the age of five.

Poverty and the Millennium Development Goals

The theme of poverty includes two specific Millennium Development Goals. These are:

Goal 1: Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger

What We Need To Do:

Cut the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and suffering from hunger in half between 1990 and 2015.

The Challenge:

  • Today, more than one billion people around the world live on less than $1 a day, and about 2.7 billion struggle to live on less than $2 a day.
  • In 2005, a total of 17 percent or 815 million people in developing regions were undernourished.

Goal 4: Reduce Child Mortality

What We Need To Do:

Reduce the under-five child mortality rate by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015.

The Challenge:

  • Almost 11 million children under the age of five die each year from preventable causes. Almost all (98 percent) of these children live in the developing world, with 45 percent in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Five diseases—HIV/AIDS, diarrhea, malaria, measles and pneumonia—account for 50 percent of the under-five deaths.

More than one billion people around the world don't have access to safe, clean drinking water.