The reality of extreme poverty

A few years ago the World Bank asked researchers to listen to what the poor are saying.  They were able to document the experiences of 60,000 women and men in 73 countries.  Over and over, in different languages and on different continents, poor people said poverty meant these things:

- You are short of food for all or part of the year, often eating only one meal per day, sometimes having to choose between stilling your child’s hunger or your own, and sometimes being able to do neither.

- You can’t save money.  If a family member falls ill and you need money to see a doctor, or if the crop fails and you have nothing to eat, you have to borrow from a local moneylender and he will charge you so much interest that the debt continues to mount and you may never be free of it.

- You can’t afford to send your children to school, or if they do start school, you have to take them out again if the harvest is poor.

- You live in an unstable house, made with mud or thatch that you need to rebuild every two or three years, or after severe weather.

- You have no close source of safe drinking water. You have to carry it a long way, and even then, it can make you ill unless you boil it.

But extreme poverty is not only having unsatisfied material needs. It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness. Even in countries that are democracies and relatively well-governed, respondents to the World Bank survey described a range of situations in which they had to accept humiliation without protest. If someone takes what little you have, and you complain to the police, they may not listen to you.  Nor will the law necessarily protect you from rape or sexual harassment if you are a woman. You have a pervading sense of shame and failure because you cannot provide for your children.  Your poverty traps you and you lose hope of ever escaping from a life of hard work for which, at the end, you will have nothing to show beyond bare survival.

The World Bank defines extreme poverty as not having enough income to meet the most basic human needs for adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation, health care or education. Many people are familiar with the statistic that a billion people are living on less than US$1 per day.  That was the World Bank’s poverty line until 2008, when better data on international price comparisons enabled it to recalculate the amount people need to meet their basic needs.  The World Bank then set a new poverty line of $1.25 per day.  The number of people whose income puts them under this poverty line is not one billion but 1.4 billion. Though there are more people living in extreme poverty than we thought, the news is not all bad.  The more accurate information shows that in 1981, there were 1.9 billion people living in extreme poverty. That was about 4 in every 10 people, whereas now fewer than 1 in 4 are extremely poor.

Here’s my question: “What should I be doing to help?”

For the first time in history, it is now within our reach to eradicate world poverty and the suffering it brings. Yet around the world, a billion people struggle to live each day on less than many of us pay for bottled water. And though the number of deaths attributable to poverty worldwide has fallen dramatically in the past half-century, nearly ten million children still die unnecessarily each year. The people of the developed world face a profound choice: If we are not to turn our backs on a fifth of the world’s population, we must become part of the solution.