Interesting Facts...

Key features of poverty today:

• The number of poor in Africa is rising. While the overall number of people living on less than $1 day has decreased between 1990 and 2001, it has increased in Sub-Saharan Africa, from 227 to 313 million in the same period. 

• The very poor are getting poorer. During the 1990s, the average income of the extremely poor in sub-Saharan Africa actually declined. Poverty has become both wider and deeper.

• Seventy percent of the poor are women. Women work two-thirds of the world's working hours, produce half of the world's food, and yet earn only 10% of the world's income and own less than 1% of the world's property. In the least developed countries, nearly twice as many women over age 15 are illiterate as men. Two-thirds of children denied primary education are girls.

• Setbacks on hunger nearly outweigh progress. There were 815 million hungry people in the developing world in 20024 — 9 million less than in 1990. Yet in the worst-affected regions — sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia — the number of hungry people has increased by tens of millions.

• Conflicts and disasters exacerbate poverty. Out of 13 million deaths in large-scale

conflicts from 1994 to 2003, over 12 million were in sub-Saharan Africa, Western Asia and Southern Asia. Not surprisingly, these regions are also home to three quarters of the world’s 37 million refugees and displaced persons. Over the same period of time, 669,000 people died as a consequence of natural disasters. Nearly three quarters of these deaths were in Eastern and Southern Asia.

• Though there are no exact statistics, it is believed that at least 10% of the world’s very poor are people with disabilities; the number may be as high as 15%, and this does not include the roughly 40 million people living with HIV and AIDS worldwide.

• More than 65% of the rural population in Latin America and the Caribbean lives below

the poverty line and, over the last two decades, the number of poor people in rural areas has increased in both absolute and relative terms. Malnutrition is not usually thought of as a Latin American problem, but in much of Central America, notably Guatemala and Nicaragua, chronic child malnutrition is as prevalent as in Africa or South Asia, and there has been no improvement for over a decade.