The Issues
Important Concepts to Address
Millennium Development Goals: a set of eight time-bound, measureable targets which set the course for the world’s efforts to alleviate extreme poverty by 2015. In their simplified version, they are:
- Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
- Achieve universal primary education
- Promote gender equality and empower women
- Reduce child mortality
- Improve maternal health
- Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
- Ensure environmental sustainability
- Develop a global partnership for development
Absolute or extreme poverty: Unable to meet the basic needs of human life
Extreme poverty is a complex condition which exists as a result of any combination of a number of causes such as:
- Political – war/conflict, history (colonialism, slavery), corruption, persecution;
- Environmental – climate change and variability, geography, land degradation and desertification, natural disasters;
- Social – population pressure, health (HIV/AIDS, malaria, TB, medical facilities, etc), gender equality, education/illiteracy, empowerment of women, exploitation (child labour, human rights), birth registration, water and sanitation, food security and agriculture, disability;
- Economic – foreign debt (cancellation of), unfair trade rules.
To access an excellent summary of the major issues of extreme poverty I recommend visiting the ONE site at: http://www.one.org/international/issues/
To access brilliant interactive maps showing the major issues and indicators of poverty in Africa and around the world, check out: http://maps.maplecroft.com/
The Breaking the Cycle LINKS page has a list of organisations and their urls which is a good place to continue your research.
To be expanded on soon…..
