What is the underlying cause of most child deaths worldwide?
pov·er·ty
Nearly all child mortality occur in low-income countries. Most children who die in low-income countries would not have become ill or would have survived their illness if they lived in a high-income country, which brings me to one of the best descriptions used to define the word poverty. In Melinda Gates' book Moment of Lift, she defines it as...
"...not being able to protect your family. Poverty is not being able to save your children when mothers with more money could. And because the strongest instinct of a mother is to protect her children, poverty is the most disempowering force on earth."
In terms of economics, the World Bank uses a monetary threshold for defining poverty. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than $1.90 (USD) per day (updated October 2015, using 2011 prices). This line reflects the amount in which minimal needs of nutrition, housing, and clothing cannot be meet. This value is determined using data across 15 of the poorest countries in the world. However, national poverty lines differ across countries of different income levels. For lower-middle income countries, such as Sri Lanka or Bolivia, poverty is defined using the benchmark of $3.20 (USD) per day and $5.50 per day for upper-middle income countries. High-income countries, like the US, draws the poverty line at $21.70 (USD) per day.
However, using a monetary value system for defining poverty does not take into account the other dimensions of poverty like education, security, sanitation, and health. These are also important to understanding the impact poverty has on the lives of the very poor. In a report published in 2018 called Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle, the World Bank helps to further broaden the way poverty is defined by combining monetary values such as household income with other well-being factors. They use the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) which captures data on consumption, education and access to basic infrastructures. Anytime there is a shortfall in one of these dimensions, we find that they are often closely related to other deficiencies especially in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa. In the figure below, we see that 64.4 percent of Sub- Saharan Africa and 26.5 percent of South Asia are multidimensionally poor. Of these, 28.2 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa and 7.0 percent in South Asia are experiencing concurrent deprivations in consumption, education and access to basic infrastructure.
Using indices such as the MPI, we gain a better understanding of poverty which helps to underscore the importance of programs that invest in human capital. It is also argued that it may be a more appropriate means to measure poverty than solely using monetary indicators. However, the $1.90 threshold is still the primary means in which we measure and define extreme poverty.
Currently, the number of people living in extreme poverty is 736 million when using the $1.90 threshold. This is a significant decline from 1990 where over 1.85 billion people or 36 percent of the world's population were living in extreme poverty. This accounts for a greater than 25 percent decrease in less than 3 decades. Most people living on less than $1.90 per day are in sub-Saharan Africa where rural communities account for a larger proportion of those in extreme poverty compared to those living in urban areas. Of those affected, children (under the age of 18 years) make up at half of all people living in extreme poverty.
The first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) to "end poverty in all its forms everywhere" aims to reduce the number of those living in extreme poverty to zero by 2030. However, despite progress, the world is NOT on track to reach that goal. The current projection approximates a continued decrease to six percent by 2030. The World Poverty Clock (brought to us by the World Data Lab in Vienna, Austria) provides a visualization of real-time poverty estimates until 2030 for almost every country in the world. This tool is helpful to understanding our current progress in reaching our goal. As of May 2019, the escape rate which calculates the current rate of poverty reduction in the world is at 0.5 people per second. The target is 1.7.
We still have a ways to go.
Moreover, in a current UN news brief, an independent group of scientist warn that all efforts to reduce poverty may be thwarted if our strategies don't drastically change. Per the report,
"The current road map for development has generated prosperity for 'hundreds of millions' but at the cost of other resources and a growing inequality that undermines global growth. Boosting economies via increasing consumption for example, is exhausting the planet’s materials and creating toxic by-products which threaten to overwhelm the world."
This further highlights that more effort is needed to reach our goal of eliminating extreme poverty. This points to needing greater foresight in incorporating economic sustainability measures that anticipate and mitigate future climate and structural changes. With that, we hopefully won't go "backwards" as stressed in the report, and instead we can continue to move forward in ending poverty.
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