What Is Poverty and How Is GFA World Helping?

Answering the “what is poverty” question is a bit more complicated than saying someone lives under a certain income. Merriam-Webster says poverty is “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions.”[1] However, poverty is more than that. It also the lack of a many of things such as:
  • Health
  • Education
  • Access to clean drinking water
  • Capability to improve one’s circumstances and life
  • Sanitation
  • Security
  • Voice.[2]
There are over 600 million living in extreme poverty around the world with thousands people falling into poverty each day.[3] This is 10 percent of the world’s population, which is a huge improvement over the last 25 years since the poverty rate was as high as 29 percent in 1995. Specific parts of the world have a much higher incidence of poverty, meaning the percentages in those areas are much higher. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 41 percent of the population lives below the international poverty line though that region has improved significantly from 59 percent of the people living in poverty in 1996. Even with the shrinking numbers, much work is still to be done.[4]

Half of the population of people living in extreme poverty are children, and 75 percent of those children live in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. The problem is worsened by the fact that 263 million children globally under 17 are not in school, which is about one in five children.[5] The UNICEF Child Mortality report from 2017 states that one child in 36 dies in their first month of life in poorer areas, while in high-income countries, that ratio is lower at one in every 333.[6] Most under-age-five deaths are caused by preventable diseases like malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia, and the main causes of those diseases are malnutrition, contaminated water and poor sanitation and hygiene. According to UNICEF, the simple practice of hand-washing can reduce the incidence of these often-deadly diseases by 40 percent, but less than half of rural populations have the knowledge or the clean water to do so.[7]

Thus, “what does poverty mean” has a more complicated answer than simply not having enough money. Poor health, water and education all contribute to a state of extreme poverty. There are actually two major types of poverty. There is absolute poverty, which is when the family’s income is not enough to maintain a basic lifestyle,. Then, relative poverty is a living on a standard that is lower than social expectations in an area.[8]

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