How many of us really know what poverty is and how many people are affected?  This thought has spurred me on to share the following with you.

Poverty:

“the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions”.

1. Half the world — nearly three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day.
2. The poorest 40% of the world population accounts for 5 percent of global income, the richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.
3. 26,500-30,000 children die each day due to poverty.
4. More than 50% of Africans suffer from water-related diseases such as cholera and infant diarrhoea.
5. More than 2.6 billion people—over 40% of the world’s population—do not have basic sanitation and more than one billion people still use unsafe sources of drinking water.
6. Every 3.6 seconds another person dies of starvation and the large majority are children under the age of 5.
7. Less than 2% of what the world spends each year on weapons is needed to put every child into basic education and yet it doesn’t happen.
8. Every year six million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday.
9. More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day…300 million are children.
10. 51 percent of the world’s 100 hundred wealthiest bodies are corporations.

Sources:

1. UNICEF
2. Poverty Facts and Stats by Global Issues – Last Updated Tuesday, March 04, 2008
3. UN Poverty Facts by Millennium Project

Copyright Info

I don’t claim ownership or origination of any of this information – it’s sort of sobering regardless of it’s source.   I have however supplied links to those websites where most of this information was found.

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