Trends in global poverty
Omnipresent supply chain issues, inflation, extreme weather, political conflict and a viral pandemic have ravaged seemingly every corner of the globe. The world's poorest now struggle even more to do more with less.
Those living in the poorest countries now spend around two-thirds of their resources on food — a high cost to merely survive. Additionally, the number of people living in extreme poverty — those living on less than $1.90 per day — took a troubling turn for the worse in 2020. World Bank Group predicts that 75 to 95 million additional people could experience extreme poverty in 2022. To make matters worse, we expect the effects of these crises to continue in most countries through 2030.
As always, it is essential to consider the multidimensional impacts of poverty, measuring poverty not just in dollars per day but in terms of access to schools, health care, clean water, economic opportunity and governmental safety nets. Children, who comprise up to half of the population in the poorest countries, are especially vulnerable to multidimensional poverty and the associated lifelong consequences, including malnutrition, illiteracy, exploitation and abuse. Approximately 100 million more children are estimated to be living in multidimensional poverty at the end of 2021 than in pre-COVID-19 times.
The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals aim to drastically reduce the number of poverty metrics by 2030. However, it's severely off track and has seen trend reversals for the first time in decades. Even before COVID-19 hit, many indicators looked bleak, and problems have since compounded. In addition to increasing global poverty, food insecurity has been made worse by the pandemic, violent conflicts and increasing natural disasters, all of which heavily impact small-scale food producers in rural areas. Illness and death from communicable diseases are expected to spike. This spike includes a 100 percent increase in malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africa and hundreds of thousands of additional under-five deaths, all of which continue to take the trend in the wrong direction. For myriad reasons, school closures, increased domestic violence, economic recession, rising income inequality, and displaced persons round out increasingly negative impacts in nearly all of the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
The world moves in cycles; markets and poverty trends rarely move in a straight line. Over the past several decades, great strides have been made in extreme poverty and quality of life. Yet storm clouds linger on the horizon, and the world is not as compartmentalized as it once was.
Systemic problems anywhere can now create ripple effects everywhere. illuminAid's efforts for crucial funding, including donations, are now of utmost importance in a time when rising costs, stagnant wages impact middle-class America, and plummeting asset values, donor-advised funds included. This makes every additional dollar that much more important to illuminAid and even more so to those in increasingly abject poverty. Our low-cost video technology continues to efficiently proliferate life-changing knowledge in the poorest locations on Earth and in an uncertain time when it is needed most.