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An initiative of Free The Children | |||
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An initiative of Free The Children | |||
Understanding the world around you is the first step towards making positive change. From clean water, to child labour, you can explore important topics with Issue Backgrounders.
Poverty is one of those things that people talk about all the time, but how often do we stop to ask what exactly poverty means? Is it just not having enough money? And how much would be "enough"? These are important questions to ask.
The standard answer today is that poverty is a person's inability to access the basic needs for survival. Child poverty involves a significant lack of the basic requirements for healthy physical, mental, emotional and spiritual development. It can result in a lack of opportunities, a lack of control over one's life, social isolation and discriminatory treatment at the hands of others.
It would be wrong to say that you need money to be happy. There are countless examples around the world that prove the strength of the human spirit, that show happiness thrives in a strong community and in sharing what you have, especially if that's very little. However, poverty is a whole different issue that doesn't have to do with just how much money one has. It is about a person's access to, or lack of, the fundamental things required to stay alive, to be healthy and aware: these are basic human rights that poverty stands in the way of.
Mahatma Gandhi once said, "Poverty is the worst form of violence." Thinking of poverty as violence shows how it actively causes harm, and how the problem is larger than just the money you earn: poverty reaches into every part of life.
Freedom from poverty gives people the freedom to live. Yet today, nearly three billion people live on less than $2 US a day. There are 1.4 billion people living in what's called "extreme poverty," marked by an income of less than $1.25 a day. These people can't afford enough food, or enough nutritious food, to survive; they can't afford proper medical care, so millions of children die every year from largely preventable diseases; they can't afford transportation to medical facilities, so about half a million women die unnecessarily every year during childbirth; they can't afford to go to school, so they never learn many of the things necessary for healthy and long lives. The list goes on.
When people have access to basic amenities such as food and shelter, they have greater dignity and hope. People are able to move beyond the state of simply surviving. They can work, make a contribution to the community and send their children to school with adequate nutrition for learning. Society as a whole benefits and can celebrate the fact that its citizens enjoy a reasonable standard of living.
Poverty also affects the environment and the sustainability of communities. People living in conditions of extreme poverty spend large amounts of time just trying to survive, so daily desperation leaves little opportunity for concerns of sustainability. For example, people will use what fuel they can find for cooking, which makes the practice of cutting down trees understandable. If living conditions improve, different sources of fuel may be available, and people can choose the ones with fewer health risks and negative effects to the environment.
Although some of us associate poverty primarily with people in faraway places, it is crucial to recognize that this challenge exists all around us in North America. In the United States, 17 percent of children live in poverty (that's 12 million). In 2010, 867,948 people in Canada used a food bank in just one month (HungerCount 2010).
Fortunately, in North America we have social programs like food banks to help people in poverty. Millions of children in other parts of the world don't have this option. Social assistance, publicly funded health and education systems, do not exist in the same way, if at all.
Because fighting poverty involves everything from employment to education to the environment, it is a central part of improving the lives of billions of people around the world. Now, with incredible technology and knowledge so widely available, we have the chance to completely end poverty. All it requires is that everyone works together. Six billion people united behind this cause: nothing can stop that.
Food Banks Canada: HungerCount 2010. http://www.foodbankscanada.ca/documents/HungerCount2010_web.pdf
UN Millennium Development Goals, Goal 1: Poverty Fact Sheet. http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2008highlevel/pdf/newsroom/Goal%201%20FINAL.pdf
Campaign 2000 – Decision Time for Canada: Let's Make Poverty History, 2005 Report Card on Child Poverty in Canada. http://campaign2000.ca
National Center for Children in Poverty; Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. http://www.nccp.org/pub_cpt05b.html
United Nations, "The Millennium Development Goals Report 2006." http://unstats.un.org/unsd/mdg/Resources/Static/Products/Progress2006/MDGReport2006.pdf
The Millennium Project: Commissioned by the UN Secretary General and supported by the UN Development Group, "Fast Facts: The Faces of Poverty." http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/resources/fastfacts_e.htm
United Nations, "The Millennium Development Goals Report 2005." http://unstats.un.org/unsd/mi/pdf/MDG%20Book.pdf
 
Youth leading global change is the movement of our time. We Day is the manifestation of this movement. 
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Free The Children believes in a world where all young people are free to achieve their fullest potential as agents of change.
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Me to We is an innovative social enterprise that provides people with better choices for a better world.
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