Even though nobody wants to listen to bad news we have to acknowledge that they provide us with the right perspectives to make our world better. So we might say, it’s a dirty job but someone has to do it, cliché enough? Knowing the worst problems in our world might just pave the way to finding solutions. I mean we all know that even in the business world, products and services are created to “fill a void”. So what do you know about world poverty?
How bad are you poor?
Many are the questions about poverty, is it unavoidable? How many poor people are there in the world? And how poor are people? Well by “extreme poverty” we mean people who live on a less than 1.25 dollars per day. Sadly, more than a billion people fit into that category. Moreover, roughly 870 million people live everyday despite not getting enough “calories”. Among there 870 million people, only 16 belong to developed countries, the rest is all in developing countries.
Haiti figures as the poorest country in the world where more than half of the population lives on less than a dollar per day. Not like the rest of the population is doing any better with less than 2 dollars per day.
However, these are not the most discouraging data on the topic. For instance, aside from the total sum of children who die daily due to malnutrition (22.000 according to UNICEF), we also have another disturbing piece of information, namelessness!
What if I told you you that about one billion people in the world are illitarate, they are unable to write their name! So Aside from not having money and food, they also lack the ability to write their name, their identity.
Any light at the end of the tunnel?
However dreadful the situation may look we should take a look at world poverty with optimism. It turns out extreme poverty is not irreversible. Since 1990 about 1 billion people came out of it. Think about China, for example, which has seen about 680 million of its people go out of extreme poverty between 1981 until 2001. If we look at more recent data, we see that the trend is continuing. In 2016 about 34 million people came out of extreme poverty, and 37 million more did the same. Asia is the pivot that drives this change.
It really seems that year after year things get better and the global institutions are putting efforts into it. Estimates from the World Bank see extreme poverty to be near extinction by 2030. Many committees have been put to work to come up with possible solutions and some of them are very simple yet ingenious. It has been estimated that providing basic education, clean water, sanitation and proper nutrition to developing countries would cost around 30 billion of dollars annually.
Several economists agree on the fact that investing in agriculture and child nutrition is the most effective way to reduce poverty. A position which is very very close to Bjorn Lomborg’s. The skeptical environementalist who said that the best way to spend a 75 billion dollars worldwide to tackle world sustainability problems is probably to increase child nutrition.
Although the task is arduous we really hope that the above mentioned predictions will become true in the future.
Thank you for your interest!
