Overview
Poverty Not a Fate! by UNDP and World Bank Ann Juepner, UNDP, and Paola Agostini and Richard Damania, World Bank
“Poverty is like heat; you cannot see it; so to know poverty, you have to go through it.” —A poor man from Adaboya, Ghana 2
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Persistent poverty is overwhelmingly rural and geographically concentrated. Despite much progress in reducing poverty in recent years, about 1.4 billion people still live on less than US$1.25 a day— which is a widely used poverty line.3 South Asia is the region with the greatest number of poor people, but sub-Saharan Africa has the highest incidence of rural poverty. Poverty is described in different ways, and there is growing agreement that it is multidimensional and at low levels of income it goes well beyond the historical notion of lack of sufficient income (or income poverty) reflected in this global poverty line. It is a dynamic and transformative process that is increasingly influenced by numerous short-term shocks and longer-term stresses, such as seasons, climate variability and change and householdlevel demographic shocks. This is why, when data is available, there is a greater focus on measuring consumption poverty than income poverty. However defined, such vulnerable populations may move in and out of poverty due to these natural and anthropogenic factors.
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UNCCD . World Bank
Multidimensional poverty acknowledges deprivations in key aspects of human well-being such as health, education and living standards,4 with more than 1.75 billion people are living under these conditions. At least 70 percent of the world’s poor are rural and a large proportion of these are children and the young. Low productivity—especially of land— is often the root cause of much of the poverty that is observed in rural areas. Vulnerability is especially high in the drylands where climate related shocks coupled with land that has low productivity and is vulnerable to overgrazing.5 The causal links between poverty and land productivity often run both ways. The poor typically inhabit marginal lands with limited potential, but extreme poverty also creates conditions which induce the poor to degrade soils and deplete valuable natural resources in their bid for survival. The short term gains are counterproductive and ultimately unsustainable. This is especially relevant in regions of the world where agriculture and livestock production, are and will remain, the default sources of income, employment and livelihoods.
