Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times—times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation—that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils.
—Nelson Mandela, 2005
Poverty is a multidimensional problem, with numerous causes and contributing factors. Because of its complexity and subtleties, misconceptions abound about the poor. One common belief is that poverty is caused by overpopulation; many people think that if the poor would only stop having children they could rise out of poverty. Another belief is that poor people must have made wrong choices that led…
In September 2000, 189 member countries of the United Nations agreed to increase the state of human development, including reducing poverty, with the adoption of the Millennium Declaration. The Declaration itself includes a commitment to reducing the number of nuclear weapons, protecting the environment, and focusing attention on Africa. But the most significant section of the Declaration became k…
Hunger's relation to poverty is reciprocal: poverty causes hunger, but hunger causes people to remain in poverty. As with every other aspect of global poverty, hunger is an immensely complicated problem, involving not just the lack of food but also the larger functions of macro- and microeconomics, national and international aid, weather and environmental changes, the availability of such s…
According to the International Labor Organization's (ILO) World Employment Report 2004–05: Employment, Productivity, and Poverty Reduction, there were 185.9 million unemployed people in the world in 2003. Perhaps more important for a discussion of poverty, of the total number of impoverished people in the world—approximately three billion living on less than two dollars per da…
In almost all societies a lack of education and literacy tends to result in a lower socioeconomic status. In its Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2006: Literacy for Life the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) names literacy as a basic human right and affirms its role in improving overall human development indicators at both the micro and macro leve…
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