Poverty doesn’t necessarily have a face you’ll recognize

Half the world lives on less than $2.50 a day

900 million people cannot read or write.

Over 2 billion don’t have clean water or basic sanitation, and one-quarter of humanity lives without electricity. Every 3.5 seconds, a child dies from poverty.

The ravages of the Covid Pandemic followed by the Russia-Ukraine war have fueled an unprecedented rise in poverty. The number of poor people has increased across all regions. The poor aren’t the only ones being affected. Households in the bottom 60 percent of the global income distribution have lost ground and spending power. 

While on the surface poverty is commonly defined as a lack of income or assets, in the day-to-day lives of the very poor poverty becomes a network of disadvantages, each one exacerbating the others.

The detrimental result is the proliferation of generation after generation of people who lack access to education, health care, adequate housing, proper sanitation, and good nutrition. 

Impoverished countries and communities often suffer from discrimination and end up caught in a cycle of poverty.

The American Dream “This dream is not about guaranteed outcomes, of course, but the pursuit of opportunities. Yet the opportunity to live the American dream is much less widely shared today than it was several decades ago. 

Poverty is a crushing burden in the US, a wealthy and unequal country that rewards merit and ignores those struggling. The rich and poor live in separate worlds lined with hope and despair, unlike many other places.

Many these days can say they live worse than their parents did; they are living the erosion of the American dream.

Almost every fourth person in the EU still experiences at least one of the three forms of poverty or social exclusion.

Monetary poverty is the most widespread form of poverty, affecting 17.3 % of EU residents in 2015. In 2023, this number increased to include 21.4% of the EU population – or some 94.6 million people – all at risk of poverty or social exclusion.

Poverty doesn’t necessarily have a face you’ll recognize…until it’s yours.