In 1990, the United Nations created a list of goals for how the world should look in the future. The list included things like gender equality, reducing child mortality and better education. At the core of all these issues is poverty, which became their number one goal. Eradicating half of all extreme poverty by the year 2020 and all of it by 2030. For a lot of experts, this seemed overly optimistic. It was seen as a lofty goal that they would likely fall short of. Instead, due to serious efforts and advances in technology, extreme global poverty was cut in half five years earlier than intended.
Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than 1.25 dollars a day. Living in extreme poverty usually means walking for transportation, making one’s children chop and gather wood for food, living on very small and non-nourishing meals, and drinking dirty water that took a long time to procure. Children either can’t afford or don’t have time for school as they need to help their family survive with what little they have. Medicine is too expensive and getting sick for children often means death, which is why large families are very common for people living in extreme poverty. As of 2015, 10% of the human population lived in extreme poverty as opposed to 36% in 1990.
However, Covid 19 has put much of the developing world at risk of sliding back into extreme poverty. This is because escaping extreme poverty can mean a lot of security against hunger and disease but very little against a disaster. It also often means still living in poverty of around 4-6 dollars a day, which is enough for basic needs, but not enough for any real economic security.
For example, if a family living in extreme poverty saves enough money to buy a chicken, they may have some eggs to sell in the market which would earn them money to buy another chicken and so on. That small asset brings them just enough money to take care of basic needs with less stress and time. This could mean a massive difference in quality of life but if something bad happens like the father gets sick, they will likely have to sell their chickens and return to extreme poverty to pay for his medicine. This is the concern with coronavirus.
With so much of the developing world shutting down economically, people are forced to spend their very important and very little savings on food and water. According to the UN, the lack of work is threatening to push 70 million people back into extreme poverty. If this happens, it will be the first time that extreme poverty has increased since 1990. The UN speculates that the fallout of this could lead to a weakening of education, human rights and food security globally, but particularly in Africa and South Asia.
To try and curb the effects of this, the World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) are discussing offering debt relief programs to the countries that are most affected. It is still unclear whether these programs will pass or not but the United States and the UK have both introduced stimulus packages that they hope will inspire other nations to do the same. The specifics will probably be determined later when the degree of damage is better understood but it is being taken seriously by major world powers.
If you would like to help this situation, please invest in your local economy. The United States can only afford to bail out other countries if it doesn’t have to bail out itself. Eat at local restaurants if they are open, buy American made products and shop locally. If you would like to send a donation to help this issue in a small way, feel free to visit any of the websites listed below.
Bibliography
“Chapter 1 .” Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong about the World - and Why Things Are Better than You Think, by Hans Rosling et al., Sceptre, 2019, pp. 35–36.
Elliott, Larry. “Coronavirus Could Push Half a Billion People into Poverty, Oxfam Warns.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 8 Apr. 2020, www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/09/coronavirus-could-push-half-a-billion-people-into-poverty-oxfam-warns.
“Goal 1: End Poverty in All Its Forms Everywhere – United Nations Sustainable Development.” United Nations, United Nations, www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/.
“Overview.” World Bank, www.worldbank.org/en/topic/poverty/overview.
