Understanding poverty: global trends and solutions

Literature on development studies is replete with tons of research papers, articles, books, conference papers, international agreements, declarations, and resolutions on the issue of poverty. In addition to these sources of information, a multiplicity of role-players which include national and international organisations, foundations, and the private sector all have either a policy or programme on one or various aspects of poverty. These vary from income-related issues, to inequality, to access to basic daily necessities and services such as food, education, health, sanitation, water, etc.

Poverty has many dimensions and manifestations from household-to-household, community-to-community, country-to-country. However, some of these dimensions are shared and common in various regions of the world owing to either common political history and/or similar economic systems or models. For example, African, Caribbean, and Latin American countries including some island nations share a common politico-economic history of colonialism and imperialism. Almost everywhere in the world, poverty is a well-researched social phenomenon.

With varying degrees of congruence and divergences, scholars of poverty generally concur that the phenomenon ostensibly reflects a state or condition of lack or deprivation of a service(s), right(s), or complete absence of care for an individual or community. In other words, people are considered poor when they cannot enjoy the benefits of basic living conditions or have no access to services that stimulate normal living conditions. Even more touchingly, poverty is manifested by people’s inability to exercise their freedoms to choose what to do or what is best for themselves on a daily basis. In other words, poverty incapacitates people from demonstrating their capabilities to determine and drive their daily lives.

In March 2024, the World Bank released a publication called the Global Poverty Monitoring Technical Note 36 entitled Update to the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP): What’s New?¹ The publication is appropriately contextualised as not covering nor containing information or data from all around the world but from regions and countries that at the time of the study, had the statistics readily available and accessible. The publication entails an assessment of the levels of poverty, improvements and challenges in certain countries and regions.

What came out clear in the report is that since 2022, in the aftermath of the global Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the pace and extent of economic recovery varied from the different regions of the world. The industrially advanced economies recovered quicker than the less industrialised. The former are mainly in regions such as Europe, North America, East and Central Asia, and the Pacific. The less industrialised economies are mainly in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and those in the Indian Ocean islands and other parts of the global south.

According to the World Bank March 2024 report, ‘the global poverty headcount ratio at the International Poverty Line, that is $2.15 per person per day, has reduced marginally by 0.1 percentage points to 8.9 percent, resulting in a revision in the number of poor people from 701 to 689 million.’² The foregoing ratio is the first poverty line, the second and the third are people who live below $3.65 and $6.85 respectively, the report added.

In these categories, the reduction of the number of people living in poverty declined by 0.6 and 0.7 percentage points respectively, translating to 52 and 44 million fewer poor people, the World Bank reported. As stated above, these statistics were obtained and assessed in countries that had readily available data and therefore may contain some degree of inaccuracies and don't necessarily have universal application and interpretation. The regions that were included in the study of extreme poverty between 2019 and 2022 were East Asia, the Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South Asia.

Any progress in the reduction of poverty levels is a welcome development and ought to be commended. However, probing questions ought to be posed and answered by all countries and concerned people. Among these are, what is to be done to completely rid the world and our communities of extreme poverty? Are government intervention policies adequate and accurately targeted to help those in dire need of care and services? Are other sectors of the economy such as the business, financial institutions, academia, non-governmental, and community-based organisations doing enough to contribute to poverty alleviation?

Are the think-tanks and research institutes well-empowered and capacitated with the requisite resources and technical wherewithal to properly research, evaluate, and present appropriate recourses required to address extreme poverty? Put differently, is extreme poverty alleviation genuinely and comprehensively dealt with as an-all-of-society and all-of-government affair? The overriding question, is it in the interest of all these stakeholders to address extreme poverty once and for all, or is it an opportunity for some to amass even more wealth whilst others see themselves as anathematised?

A partial response to the manifold questions raised above include a re-affirmation of the fact that citizens themselves have to be involved in changing the course of their daily lives. Besides depending and relying on government and/or humanitarian aid, the citizens ought to mobilise and organise themselves to work together to confront common socio-economic challenges such as extreme poverty. However, this is already happening in many communities and countries around the world, but the results are either miniscule or negligible. This is due to many contributory factors such as population growth, high unemployment rate, food insecurity, climate change, and man-made disasters such as violent conflicts and war which also have their underlying political and economic nuances.

In another 2024 global poverty report, the World Bank and the United Nations (UN) concur in their assessments of progress and regression toward the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goal 1 (SDG)on No Poverty by the year 2030. The two global institutions agree that the COVID-19 pandemic fomented serious setbacks in meeting the No Poverty SDG target. The 2024 UN Fact Sheet on SDGs released for the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development held in July 2024 states that the COVID-19 pandemic triggered extreme poverty to rise in 2020, reversing the gains already made by three years.

According to the UN Fact Sheet, the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty rose from 8.9% in 2019 to 9.7% in 2020, driven by increases in low- and lower-middle-income countries.³ By 2022, it was reported that the population of people living in extreme poverty was 712 million people (or 9% of the world's population), an increase of 23 million people from 2019.⁴ There is a clear disjuncture between the UN Report and the World Bank’s What’s New document released in March 2024.

This patently points to issues related to access and availability of accurate and verifiable data on extreme poverty. Furthermore, this also reveals the multidimensional nature of poverty as a social phenomenon. A single measure of poverty which, for example, only focuses on income and monetary factors but excludes other dimensions such as access to basic services, namely; water, sanitation, education, health. and other social services, falls short in providing a comprehensive and compelling account on the real scale and extent of extreme poverty.

Greatly concerning though, is the warning issued by the UN in the SDGs 2024 Fact Sheet, that if the world doesn’t accelerate pace in addressing poverty, by 2030, 590 million people may still live in the undesirable condition of extreme poverty. A combination of factors makes fighting poverty a complicated conundrum. On one hand, there is a challenge of lack of or poor government services with all the attendant issues. On the other hand, there is a global economic slowdown with its own accompanying factors such as low productivity, rapid technological advancements that displaces people from manual and low-skills jobs, etc. Poor governance and lack of moral leadership is also at the centre of the problem both in the political realm and other sectors of society.

Interlinking the above challenges are other global pressing emergencies such as climate change, frequent natural disasters and their adverse effect on food security, and ongoing political instability and conflicts in some regions which displace people and live them destitute and worse-off. On climate change and natural disasters, the UN Fact Sheet states that between 2015 and 2022, the average annual direct economic losses attributed to disasters exceeded $115 billion worldwide, an amount equivalent to 0.3% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of reporting countries.⁵

Worth mentioning also is the fact that poverty tends to have a more severe impact on women who are trapped in traditional restrictive cultures which don’t permit them to pursue modern careers in corporate environments. The struggles for women against poverty become particularly acute when they are even abandoned by their men leaving them with kids and with nothing to support them to make a living for themselves.

In the February 2024 report, Oxfam reports that since 2020, the world has witnessed the wealth of the top five billionaires doubling, while nearly five billion people globally have slid into poverty. The stark reality persists, it would take 230 years to eradicate poverty, instead a trillionaire could emerge within a decade.⁶ An inference that can be made from this statement is that persistent poverty is beneficial to those who are already well-off and needless to say, is fatal to the worse-off. Like the industrialised countries, rich individuals always do whatever is in their power to maintain and sustain their dominance of the weak and vulnerable through either paying them slave salaries or replacing them with machines in their factories whilst they continue to maximise profits on automated mass productions.

To buttress the foregoing argument, the International Labour Organisation in its 2022-2023 Global Wage Report states that for the first time this century, global real wage growth has become negative while real productivity has continued to grow. Indeed, 2022 shows the largest gap recorded since 1999 between real labour productivity growth and real wage growth in high-income countries. While the erosion of real wages affects all wage earners, it is having a greater impact on low-income households which spend a higher proportion of their disposable incomes on essential goods and services, the prices of which are increasing faster than those for non-essential items in most countries.⁷

An individual and collective household’s level of income are important determinants of the quality of life and social class or status. In essence, fighting poverty in all its dimensions, internationally and nationally ought to also elevate the importance of professional and career progression with commensurate incomes, wages and/or salaries. The penchant of the capitalist to capitalise on the weaknesses of the poor and vulnerable must be one of the issues that are streamlined in the global efforts to fight poverty. Genuine international debates on human rights must put arresting the uncontrollable and insatiable greed of the capitalists at the centre of the fight against poverty and inequality. The world can’t decisively win the fight against poverty whilst the conditions that generate and exacerbate it still persist.

The sustainable development agenda that has been the focus of attention since the introduction of the Millenium Development Goals in the year 2000 and later Sustainable Development Goals in 2015 has not done much to address persistent poverty both in developed and developing countries alike but more so in the latter. Looking into the future, more deliberate efforts at all levels of society, from the grassroots to the global stage, must be refocused to put people at the centre of development, not only technological advancements or glittering infrastructure. These developments must be regulated to benefit not just the educated, skilled, professional, and more so the capitalist, but they must serve humankind literally leaving no one behind.

At the political level and in democratic societies, people have the power to elect their leaders who should or are entrusted with the responsibility to alleviate poverty. However, the manipulative machinations of the capitalists meets the desperation and helplessness of the poor at the centre of the intersection of their lives, which is the economy. Due to their greed to survive and the determination to sustain their privileges at all costs, the capitalists offer whatever will entice the poor to remain trapped in a relationship of dependence on them rather than cooperation and collaboration, if not interdependence.

The poor on their side, due to their inability and lack of resources to make independent choices, are quite often left with little or no option but to accept that which is available to secure one’s daily survival, even if it means sacrificing pursuits of other life advancing alternatives. Daily survival becomes a foremost consideration. Until the poor stand up for themselves, claim the political and economic power from the greedy capitalists and completely uproot the dominant unfair systems that reproduce poverty, nothing will ever change.