Seeking Justice and Defending Human Rights Wherever Poverty and Oppression Exist

Gospel for Asia (GFA World) Special Report on the worldwide issue of extreme poverty

Written by Palmer Holt of InChrist Communications

More than 80 years after George Orwell wrote in his classic Animal Farm that “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others,” his barbed observation on disparity rings ever truer for humankind.
According to a 2017 report by Credit Suisse Research Institute, 10 percent of the world’s richest population owns 88 percent of all global wealth, while “3.5 billion individuals — 70% of all adults in the world — have wealth below USD 10,000.” That includes some who could be living in grinding poverty in Asia.

Poverty devastates the whole family, often causing children to drop out of school early to start working. This boy is one of 168 million child laborers doing the backbreaking work of collecting, breaking and selling rocks from a nearby river.
Despite improvements in some parts of the globe, the World Bank says “extreme poverty remains unacceptably high.”

Globally, 1 in 10 is below the poverty line, somehow surviving on less than $1.90 a day.

If such staggering inequality doesn’t provoke the rich to concern for reasons of the heart, it should at least cause them to reflect on the ongoing health of their wallets. The World Economic Forumsees the rising gap between the haves and the have-nots, and the social polarization it breeds, as a major threat to world financial stability.

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