Poverty

What is poverty ?
Poverty designates in a given society the fact of being in a
situation of material inferiority in relation to the most favored
individuals; this is reflected in particular by difficulties in
meeting their needs and those of their loved ones, but also by
stigmatization on the part of wealthier people. However,
there is no completely consensual and universal definition of
poverty. The satisfaction of basic needs is deemed essential
for a decent life for a human being; with technical progress
and the improvement of living conditions in developed
countries, a definition based on poverty lines relating to the
median income has emerged without any link to the
satisfaction of these needs. In other words, the number of
poor is that which corresponds to all the people with a per
capita income below a certain percentage of the median
income. This threshold is generally 20%. The term “poverty”,
relative to that of wealth, thus refers more to situations of
economic and political inequality between individuals and
between societies.
Causes of poverty

Poverty can result from chronic situations inherited from

birth, the extreme case of which is slavery, but also be
perpetuated from generation to generation through social
organization linked to access to education, state of health, or
particular political status; it can also occur through incidents
in a person's life, such as spoliation, natural disasters and
destruction of property, unemployment, etc.

But this often leads to a vicious circle. Poverty forces people

to find low-cost housing, therefore in neighborhoods with a
bad reputation, where there is little work and a degraded
educational offer, crime, if not higher, at least more violent,
less active medical prevention, etc. The chances of finding an
income through work are less, the temptation stronger to
resort to illegal work (“under the table”), to sources of
income that are illusory (lotteries, bets) or dangerous (crime,
drugs) or even degrading (prostitution), the risks of accidents
are greater, and exploitation by the mafias, or organized
groups, are factors of desocialization, even of both personal
and global insecurity. This phenomenon can affect children
and teenagers, who in such a context start their life with a
handicap, even if the worst is by no means reached for them.
In developing countries, where resources are scarce, the
consequences are even more marked (famines, health
disasters, etc.). little is held back by poverty. And the cost of
this mobility (moving, travel expenses or owning a vehicle)
weighs all the more heavily when income is low.
Why is poverty dangerous?
Poverty entails more than the lack of income and productive
resources to ensure sustainable livelihoods. Its
manifestations include hunger and malnutrition, limited
access to education and other basic services, social
discrimination and exclusion as well as the lack of
participation in decision-making. Various social groups bear
disproportionate burden of poverty. The World Social Summit
identified poverty eradication as an ethical, social, political
and economic imperative of mankind and called on
governments to address the root causes of poverty, provide
for basic needs for all and ensure that the poor have access to
productive resources, including credit, education and
training. Recognizing insufficient progress in the poverty
reduction, the 24th special session of the General Assembly
devoted to the review of the Copenhagen commitments,
decided to set up targets to reduce the proportion of people
living in extreme poverty by one half by 2015. This target has
been endorsed by the Millennium Summit as Millennium
Development Goal 1.Poverty eradication must be
mainstreamed into the national policies and actions in
accordance with the internationally agreed development
goals forming part of the broad United Nations Development
Agenda, forged at UN conferences and summits in the
economic, social and related fields. The Second United
Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty (2008-2017),
proclaimed by the General Assembly in December 2007 aims
at supporting such a broad framework for poverty
eradication, emphasizing the need to strengthen the
leadership role of the United Nations in promoting
international cooperation for development, critical for the
eradication of poverty.
The impact of poverty on the world
Behind all the numbers for poverty and inequality presented
in the preceding pages are the lives of more than 1.4 billion
desperately poor people across the world who live in some of
the worst conditions possible. AIDS, malaria, starvation, and
other deadly diseases are common. Many children die before
reaching adolescence, and many adults die before reaching
what in the richest nations would be considered middle age.
Many people in the poorest nations are illiterate, and a
college education remains as foreign to them as their way of
life would be to us. Occasionally, we see the world’s poor in
TV news reports or in film documentaries before they fade
quickly from our minds. Meanwhile, millions of people on our
planet die every year because they do not have enough to
eat, because they lack access to clean water or adequate
sanitation, or because they lack access to medicine that is
found in every CVS, Rite Aid, and Walgreens in the United
States.

As noted earlier, the United Nations Development

Programme, the World Bank, and other international
agencies issue annual reports on human development
indicators that show the impact of living in a poor nation. This
section begins with a look at some of the most important of
these indicators. The status of a nation’s health is commonly
considered perhaps the most important indicator of human
development. When we look around the world, we see that
global poverty is literally a matter of life and death. The
clearest evidence of this fact comes from data on life
expectancy, the average number of years that a nation’s
citizens can be expected to live. Life expectancy certainly
differs within each nation, with some people dying younger
and others dying older, but poverty and related conditions
affect a nation’s overall life expectancy to a startling degree.
Solutions
To end extreme poverty worldwide in 20 years, economist
Jeffrey Sachs calculated that the total cost per year would be
about $175 billion. This represents less than one percent of
the combined income of the richest countries in the world.
Other solutions are:
Educate children
Provide clean water
Ensure basic health care
Empower a girl or woman
Improve childhood nutrition
Support environmental programs
Reach children in conflict
Prevent child marriage
Conclusion:
Poverty has become a great issue in our world. Though many
organizations have been created to find solutions for this
matter nobody could not save our world completely from
poverty. The most common fact which we can realize when
we consider on information about poverty is that poverty is
mostly occurring in developing countries.