Tag Archives: poverty

Policymakers must take action to preserve access to nutrition assistance.

The richest 1% now own more wealth than the rest of the world combined while the wealth owned by the bottom half of humanity has fallen by a trillion dollars in the past five years.

Poverty affected 167 million people in 2014, 2 million more than 2013. Similarly, 71 million suffered extreme poverty or indigence, an increase of 2 million over the previous year.

Fifty years on from the Great Society program, what has been achieved – and what hasn’t – in government efforts to reduce poverty.

The game of one-upmanship by India and Pakistan, the two leading countries of SAARC, is likely to do immense harm to the cause of the poverty-ridden South Asian region, where concerted efforts at regional cooperation could be crucial in shaping its future development.

The world’s 85 richest billionaires now hold as much wealth as the 3.5 billion people in humanity’s poorer half. The combined wealth of these 85 billionaires is increasing at the rate of a half million dollars a minute. But one respected anti-poverty charity’s new global campaign may help minimize economic inequality.

Despite being a middle-income country, South Africa has a long and shameful history of those in power ignoring the needs and the interests of the majority. Colonial and subsequent Apartheid laws reduced black people in South Africa to merely being cheap labor to service the needs of these economies. Poverty, inequality and hunger, while visible in the faces and cupped hands of people at traffic lights in middle-class neighborhoods, largely continue to be felt most in townships, informal settlements and rural areas which are often located far away from economic and suburban hubs.

Recent studies reveal rising inflation and unemployment creating high misery for people. Fueled by these adverse reports, food insecurity, poverty and malnutrition problems had again momentarily hit national headlines, as they periodically do before being quickly displaced by political scandals.   Measuring these problems in Pakistan is made difficult by competing concepts, definitions and measurement approaches. Food security represents “regular …

Africa is losing 50 billion dollars or 5.7% of sub-Saharan Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) each year due to unending plunder of its forests, fisheries and other resources by corrupt officials and foreign investors, says a major new report on the continent.   Africa’s rich natural resources offer a unique opportunity for a breakthrough in improving the lives of Africa’s citizens …

“Are we some rubbish to be thrown out of the city by the government?” asks a woman living in Lyari, Karachi. “Why should we go to the outskirts of the city? Give us space close to the centre of the city.”   She expresses the anger of many of Karachi’s urban poor who feel that their preference to live in …