Facts on poverty in the world
More than 1.2 billion people—one in every five on Earth—survive on less than $1 a day
The top 1% of the world’s richest people earn as much as the poorest 57%
In the 1990s average per capita income growth was less than 3% in 125 developing and transition countries, and was negative in 54
During the 1990s the share of people living in extreme poverty fell from 30% to 23%. But as world population increased, the number fell only by 123 million, and if booming China is left out, the number actually increased by 28 million
Of the around six billion people in the world, at least 1.2 billion do not have access to safe drinking water
More than 2.4 billion people do not have proper sanitation facilities, and more than 2,2 million people die each year from diseases caused by polluted water and filthy sanitation conditions
Two-thirds of the world’s 876 million illiterates are women
About 80% of economically active women in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia work in agriculture
The annual dairy subsidy in the EU amounts to $913 per cow per year; EU’s aid to Africa is $8 per African per year
Reaching the Millennium Development Goals depends on many factors, not least political will and money. It is estimated that US$100 billion in assistance a year, at a minimum, will be needed until 2015.
During the 1990s, government development assistance dropped from 0.33% to 0.22% of donor countries’ gross national income. The target is 0.7% of the 49 least developed countries, 31 receive less aid today than they did in 1990.
Tackling hunger is vital to making poverty history. Research suggests that developing countries that focus exclusively on poverty – without paying special attention to hunger – will take a generation longer to make real progress on improving their people’s nutrition and health.
Banishing hunger must be a large part of making poverty history. One African in three is malnourished. Hunger in Africa, like elsewhere, is both a cause and an effect of poverty. There is saying in Africa: “When you take hunger out of poverty, poverty is halved.”
While global poverty dropped by 20 per cent during the 1990s, the number of hungry actually rose. Today the total number of people around the world who know the pain of hunger stands at a staggering 852 million.
In 7 southern Africa countries the number of people in need of emergency food aid this year has rapidly risen from 3.5 million to 8.3 million, mainly because of drought – 4 million in Zimbabwe, 1.6 million in Malawi, 1.2 million in Zambia, 900,000 in Mozambique, 245,000 in Lesotho, 230,000 in Swaziland and 60,000 in Namibia.
In addition, the triple threat of HIV/AIDS, food insecurity and weakening capacity for service delivery is leaving whole societies much more vulnerable to external shocks.
Latest estimates suggest that the combined cost of protein-energy malnutrition, low birth weight babies, and micronutrient deficiencies, lose developing countries 5 to 10 percent of their GDP – at least US $500 billion. Investing in food to keep people healthy makes economic sense.
Immediate assistance for the hungry poor must be combined with long-term development to boost productivity, create employment and increase the value of the assets that poor people own. This must focus on where it is needed most – in rural areas and in agriculture.
This twin-track approach would cost an extra US$25 billion per year. Developing countries currently spend US$30 billion dealing with the consequences of hunger and malnutrition: health care for anaemic pregnant women; underweight babies; and malnourished children.
More than one billion people in the world live on less than one dollar a day. In total, 2.7 billion struggle to survive on less than two dollars per day. Poverty in the developing world, however, goes far beyond income poverty. It means having to walk more than one-mile everyday simply to collect water and firewood; it means suffering diseases that were eradicated from rich countries decades ago. Every year eleven million children die-most under the age of five and more than six million from completely preventable causes like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia.
In some deeply impoverished nations less than half of the children are in primary school and under-20 percent go to secondary school. Around the world, a total of 114 million children do not get even a basic education and 584 million women are illiterate.
Following are basic facts outlining the roots and manifestations of the poverty affecting more than one third of our world.
Every year six million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday.
More than 50 percent of Africans suffer from water-related diseases such as cholera and infant diarrhea.
Everyday HIV/AIDS kills 6,000 people and another 8,200 people are infected with this deadly virus.
Every 30 seconds an African child dies of malaria-more than one million child deaths a year.
Each year, approximately 300 to 500 million people are infected with malaria. Approximately three million people die as a result.
TB is the leading AIDS-related killer and in some parts of Africa, 75 percent of people with HIV also have TB.
More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day...300 million are children.
Of these 300 million children, only eight percent are victims of famine or other emergency situations.
More than 90 percent are suffering long-term malnourishment and micronutrient deficiency.
Every 3.6 seconds another person dies of starvation and the large majority are children under the age of 5.
More than 2.6 billion people-over 40 per cent of the world's population-do not have basic sanitation, and more than one billion people still use unsafe sources of drinking water.
Four out of every ten people in the world don't have access even to a simple latrine.
Five million people, mostly children, die each year from water-borne diseases.
In 1960, Africa was a net exporter of food; today the continent imports one-third of its grain.
More than 40 percent of Africans do not even have the ability to obtain sufficient food on a day-today basis.
Declining soil fertility, land degradation, and the AIDS pandemic have led to a 23 percent decrease in food production per capita in the last 25 years even though population has increased dramatically.
For the African farmer, conventional fertilizers cost two to six times more than the world market price.
Above 80 percent of farmers in Africa are women.
More than 40 percent of women in Africa do not have access to basic education.
If a girl is educated for six years or more, as an adult her prenatal care, postnatal care and childbirth survival rates, will dramatically and consistently improve.
Educated mothers immunize their children 50 percent more often than mothers who are not educated.
AIDS spreads twice as quickly among uneducated girls than among girls that have even some schooling.
The children of a woman with five years of primary school education have a survival rate 40 percent higher than children of women with no education.
A woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a 1 in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy. This compares with a 1 in 3,700 risk for a woman from North America.
Every minute, a woman somewhere dies in pregnancy or childbirth. This adds up to 1,400 women dying each day-an estimated 529,000 each year-from pregnancy-related causes.
Almost half of births in developing countries take place without the help of a skilled birth attendant.
