For decades, one of the most important indicators of global well-being has kept moving in the right direction: Extreme poverty has been falling.
Although experts can and do debate the details, hundreds of millions of families moved from subsisting on less than $1.90/day (the World Bank’s standard for “extreme poverty”) to living on a little more.
What would you estimate is the minimum amount of money you need to get by every day? $100? $50? The figure, of course, The World Bank’s Poverty Illusion
What would you estimate is the minimum amount of money you need to get by every day? $100? $50? The figure, of course, depends
Poverty is suddenly all over the front page. As coronavirus ravages the globe, its wholly disproportionate impact on poor people and marginalised communities is inescapable. Hundreds of millions of people are being pushed into poverty and unemployment, with woeful support in most places, alongside a huge expansion in
Data: The World Bank and World Poverty Clock. Note: 1999-2015 World Bank figures are incomplete in South Asia. 2016-2019 figures are World Poverty Clock projections. Chart: Danielle Alberti/Axios
The 2010s may be remembered as the decade when the global 1% accumulated
New data suggests that by 2030, nearly nine out of 10 of the world’s people living in extreme poverty will be sub-Saharan Africans. Despite the images of urban slums that usually accompany stories of poverty, the vast majority of these people will be rural dwellers. We know the last frontiers of extreme poverty are “fragile
There are still around 783 million people around the world living in extreme poverty. That’s the level of poverty where families have to survive on less than $2 per day, where healthcare is an unaffordable luxury, and simply scratching together enough food to survive is a daily challenge. It’s the level of poverty where, should
Three years ago the world lined up behind an ambitious set of targets – the sustainable development goals – for 2030. The checklist included the eradication of extreme poverty, ending preventable child deaths and delivering quality universal education. As part of the pledge, governments committed to achieving the most rapid progress
Last September, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released its annual Goalkeeper’s report, highlighting the extraordinary progress made in reducing extreme poverty around the world, while also warning that sustaining this progress would not be easy.
We now have the first actual data points that ring the alarm bells about a new, unfolding story on global
A U.N.-supported human rights expert has blasted the yawning gap between rich and poor in the United States, insisting in a new report that the world’s richest country “is now moving full steam ahead to make itself even more unequal.”
The United Nations’ human rights office said Monday that Philip Alston, an independent expert commissioned to
In December last year, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Professor Philip Alston, issued a statement on his 15-day fact-finding mission of some of the U.S.’s poorest neighborhoods. Alston, the author of the quoted phrase in the excerpt, is an Australian who is a professor of law at New York University.
You might think that the kind of extreme poverty that would concern a global organization like the United Nations has long vanished in this country. Yet the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, recently made and reported on an investigative tour of the United States.
The development charity Oxfam has called for action to tackle the growing gap between rich and poor as it launched a new report showing that 42 people hold as much wealth as the 3.7 billion who make up the poorest half of the world’s population.
How can we alleviate extreme poverty? It’s the question that underpins the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs), and almost all development projects. Because poverty almost always shows itself as a lack of resources in poor communities – food, safe water, sanitation, education, healthcare – it’s reasonable to theorise that poverty is a resource problem. So,
North Texas was freezing during a three-day stretch last month, but Mary Garcia refused to turn on the heat in her cramped apartment. She feared that doing so would too quickly drain her pay-as-you-go account with Penstar Power, a Dallas-based electricity provider.
On Dec. 19, with just $15.31 in her account and the outside thermometer showing
Did you hear the breaking news? Yesterday, 138,000 people rose out of extreme poverty. Another 138,000 rose out of extreme poverty the day before. And the day before that, too. Of course you didn’t, because a plane crash or a terrorist attack is news, but slow and steady progress is not. Even 50million people rising
Hopes that half of the world’s 48 least developed nations could emerge from extreme poverty by the end of the decade have been dashed after a UN body reported the weakest year of growth in more than 20 years.
The UN conference on trade and development (Unctad) said plunging commodity prices
Here’s an amazing fact: The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 114 million from 2012 to 2013. That is a simply massive one-year decline, and it’s not even the biggest drop in recent years. From 2010 to 2011, global poverty fell by 132 million people. From 2008 to 2013, the number fell by