Key facts: The faces of poverty

More than 1 milliard people in the world make their living on less than 1 dollar a day.  Another 2.7 milliard struggles to live on less than 2 dollars a day.  However, poverty in the developing world goes far beyond income poverty. It means having to walk 1.5 km every day to collect water and firewood; it means suffering diseases that were eradicated from rich countries decades ago. Every year 11 million children die, most under age of five, and more than 6 million deaths result from completely preventable diseases such as malaria, diarrhoea or pneumonia.
In the most impoverished countries less than half of the children attend primary schools and less than 20 percent go to secondary schools.  Around the world, a total of 114 million children do not get even basic education and 584 million of women are illiterate.  
Following are the key facts outlining the roots and manifestations of poverty affecting more than one-third of the entire world population.

Health

• Every year 6 million children die of malnutrition before their fifth birthday
• Over 50 percent of Africans suffer from water-related diseases such as cholera and infant diarrhoea.  
• Every day HIV/ AIDS kills 6,000 people and another 8,200 people get infected with the lethal virus.  
• Every 30 seconds an African child dies of malaria what makes over 1 million deaths a year.  
• Every year approximately 300 to 500 million people get infected with malaria.  The disease contributes to death of about 3 million of people.  
• Tuberculosis is the leading AIDS- related killer. In some African regions 75 percent of the people with HIV suffer also from tuberculosis.

Hunger

• More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day- 300 million are children.
• Of the overall number of 300 million, only 8 percent are children affected by famine or other emergency situations.  More than 90 percent suffer from long-term malnutrition and micronutrient deficiency.    
• Every 3.6 seconds another person dies of starvation, and the large majority are children under the age of 5.  

Water

• More than 2.6 milliard people—over 40 percent people worldwide- do not have basic sanitation and more than 1 milliard still use unsafe sources of drinking water.  
• Four in ten people worldwide do not have access even to a basic toilet and two in ten to safe drinking water.  
• 5 million people, mostly children, die of water- borne diseases.  

Agriculture

• In 1960 Africa was a net food exporter; currently, the continent imports one-third of its grain.  
• More than 40 percent of the entire African population do not even have the ability to obtain sufficient food on a day-to-day basis.
• Declining soil fertility, land degradation  and AIDS pandemic have led to 23 percent decrease in food production per capita in the last 25 years even though the population has increased dramatically.    
• For an African farmer, regular fertilisers cost 2 to 6 times more than the world market price.  

The devastating effect of poverty on women

• Above 80 percent of farmers in Africa are women.

• More than 40 percent of African women do not have access to basic education.
• If a girl is educated for six years or more, as an adult her prenatal care, postnatal care and childbirth survival rates will dramatically and consistently improve.  
• Educated mothers immune their children 50 % more often than those who have not attended any schools.
• AIDS spreads twice as fast among the uneducated girls than among the girls with minimum education.  
• The survival rate of the children whose mothers have attended primary school for 5 years is 40 percent higher compared to the children of the uneducated mothers.
• One in sixteen women living in the Sub-Saharan Africa regions may die during pregnancy or childbirth. The risk for a woman from North America is 1 to 3700.  
• Every minute a woman somewhere dies in pregnancy or childbirth. It adds up to 1400 women dying every day – estimated 520 000 annually – of pregnancy-related causes.  
• Around half of births in the developing countries take place without assistance of a skilled birth attendant.  

Source: unic.un.org.pl
UN Millennium Project
Report: "Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals”