THE world's extremely poor (those who live on less than US$1.90 a day, aka the international poverty line) are set to increase by 71 to 100 million this year, says a June estimate of the World Bank.
The reason? Covid-19. The variation in the numbers is due to the bank's reading of how badly the disease will impact the world's economy. If a broader measure is used to include those who have neither shelter nor water to drink, as the United Nation does, The Economist says the ranks of the poor will swell by 240 to 490 million this year.
An increase of this proportion in one year speaks badly of the world and its leaders. True, Covid-19 must be assigned some blame. In the estimate of the English weekly newspaper, it may wipe out a decade of hard work on poverty eradication.
Data from the UN seem to point that way. In 1990, 36 per cent of the world's population lived on US$1.90 or less. In 2010, this number dropped to 16 per cent. Five years later, the number of people living under the international poverty line dropped to 10 per cent.
With Covid-19 adding a hundred million people to the very poor list, the UN's new target of three per cent for 2030, let alone its original goal of ending poverty in 10 years, will be a distant dream.
Admittedly, poverty, more so extreme poverty, is one huge problem. But it isn't one without a solution. Poverty needs to be tackled at three levels. Firstly, leaders of countries where the poor live — mostly in subsaharan Africa and South Asia — must do everything within their means to end poverty.
The Overseas Development Institute (ODI), an independent think-tank that has been doing research on poverty eradication, names three areas that the leaders should focus on: education, health and social protection. But, according to ODI's own assessment, 29 of these very poor countries can't pay half the cost of what is needed to be done. This is where the second level kicks in.
The international community must give aid and must give it to the right places, says Marcus Manuel in an ODI video presentation. At the moment, he says, the international community is giving 10 times the aid to countries that are most able to pay for poverty-eradication programmes. This needs to be reversed. He suggests the donors do two things to end extreme poverty.
One, better target the aid to the countries that need it the most. Two, they need to step up and provide the UN target for aid for all countries.
Finally, the world's richest one per cent need to play their part in financing the end of poverty. After all, they earned 44 per cent of the world's wealth last year, according to Credit Suisse Research Institute's Global Wealth Report. And it is in their interest, too, to make the world less hungry.
Remember 2011 and its Occupy Wall Street protests against income inequality? It didn't start and end in New York city. More than 950 cities in 82 countries vented their frustrations. The Occupy Wall Street may have gone, but it has left its anger behind. If the World Data Lab is right, there are more than 717,867,193 people living in extreme poverty as this Leader goes to press.
This is a very hungry world. Let's stop poverty before it turns this world into an angry one too.