Poverty is defined as lacking basic human needs like food, water, shelter, etc. Characteristics of poverty include poor health, hunger, inadequate housing, and violence. Living in poverty increases risks of disease, starvation, homelessness, and exploitation. Poverty can perpetuate across generations through family background and a "culture of poverty" where the poor have different values like not planning for the future. Reducing poverty involves increasing access to healthcare, education, income opportunities, and financial services while controlling overpopulation.

1. By: Javier Ng

2. What is Poverty?

 Poverty is the state of one who lacks a certain
amount of material possessions or money.
 It refers to the deprivation of basic human
needs, which commonly includes
food, water, sanitation, clothing, shelter, health care
and education.

3. Characteristic

 Health
 Hunger
 Housing and utilities
 Violence

4. Health

 One third of deaths – some 18 million people a year or
50,000 per day – are due to poverty-related causes: in total
270 million people, most of them women and
children, have died as a result of poverty since 1990.
Those living in poverty suffer disproportionately from
hunger or even starvation and disease. Those living in
poverty suffer lower life expectancy. According to the
World Health Organization, hunger and malnutrition are
the single gravest threats to the world's public health and
malnutrition is by far the biggest contributor to child
mortality, present in half of all cases. Almost 90% of
maternal deaths during childbirth occur in Asia and sub-
Saharan Africa, compared to less than 1% in the
developed world.

5. Hunger

 Rises in the costs of living making poor people less
able to afford items. Poor people spend a greater
portion of their budgets on food than richer people.
As a result, poor households and those near the
poverty threshold can be particularly vulnerable to
increases in food prices. For example, in late 2007
increases in the price of grains led to food riots in
some countries. The World Bank warned that 100
million people were at risk of sinking deeper into
poverty. Threats to the supply of food may also be
caused by drought and the water crisis.

6. Housing and utilities

 Poverty increases the risk of homelessness. Slum-dwellers, who
make up a third of the world's urban population, live in a
poverty no better, if not worse, than rural people, who are the
traditional focus of the poverty in the developing
world, according to a report by the United Nations. There are
over 100 million street children worldwide. Most of the
children living in institutions around the world have a
surviving parent or close relative, and they most commonly
entered orphanages because of poverty. Experts and child
advocates maintain that orphanages are expensive and often
harm children's development by separating them from their
families. It is speculated that, flush with money, orphanages
are increasing and push for children to join even though
demographic data show that even the poorest extended
families usually take in children whose parents have died.

7. Violence

 According to experts, many women become victims
of trafficking, the most common form of which is
prostitution, as a means of survival and economic
desperation. Deterioration of living conditions can
often compel children to abandon school in order to
contribute to the family income, putting them at risk
of being exploited. For example, in Zimbabwe, a
number of girls are turning to prostitution for food
to survive because of the increasing poverty.

8. Reduction of Poverty

 Health care and education
 Controlling overpopulation
 Increasing personal income
 Financial services

9. Healthcare and
education

 Nations do not necessarily need wealth to gain health. For
example, Sri Lanka had a maternal mortality rate of 2% in
the 1930s, higher than any nation today. It reduced it to
0.5–0.6% in the 1950s and to .06% today while spending
less each year on maternal health because it learned what
worked and what did not. Cheap water filters and
promoting hand washing are some of the most cost
effective health interventions and can cut deaths from
diarrhoea and pneumonia. Knowledge on the cost
effectiveness of healthcare interventions can be elusive
and educational measures have been made to disseminate
what works, such as the Copenhagen Consensus.

10. Controlling
overpopulation

 Some argue that overpopulation and lack of access to
birth control leads to population increase to exceed
food production and other resources. Empowering
women with better education and more control of
their lives makes them more successful in bringing
down rapid population growth because they have
more say in family planning.

11. Increasing personal
income

 Income grants are argued to be vastly more efficient in
extending basic needs to the poor than in-kind subsidies. In
some countries, fuel subsidies are a larger part of the budget
than health and education. Additionally, most of the
beneficiaries of in-kind subsidies are those who are not
poor, such as by those who consume the same subsidized
fuel, thus hampering the subsidies' effectiveness . A 2008 study
concluded that the money spent on in-kind transfers in India in
a year could lift all India’s poor out of poverty for that year if
transferred directly. Similarly, the famine relief model
increasing used by aid groups calls for giving cash or cash
vouchers to the hungry to pay local farmers instead of buying
food from donor countries, often required by law, as it wastes
money on transport costs.

12. Financial services

 Those in poverty place overwhelming importance on having a safe
place to save money, much more so than receiving loans. Also, a
large part of microfinance loans are spent on products that would
usually be paid by a checking or savings account. Lack of financial
services, as a result of restrictive regulations, such as the
requirements for banking licenses, makes it hard for even smaller
micro savings programs to reach the poor. Mobile banking utilizes
the wide availability of mobile phones to address the problem of
the heavy regulation and costly maintenance of saving accounts.
Safaricom’s M-Pesa launched one of the first systems where a
network of agents of mostly shopkeepers, instead of bank
branches, would take deposits in cash and translate these onto a
virtual account on customers' phones. Cash transfers can be done
between phones and issued back in cash with a small
commission, making remittances safer.

13. Cycle of poverty

 In economics, the cycle of poverty is the "set of factors or
events by which poverty, once started, is likely to
continue unless there is outside intervention."
 The cycle of poverty has been defined as a phenomenon
were poor families become trapped in poverty for at least
three generations, i.e., for enough time that the family
includes no surviving ancestors who possess and can
transmit the intellectual, social, and cultural capital
necessary to stay out of or escape poverty; in calculations
of expected generation length and ancestor lifespan, the
lower median age of parents in these families is offset by
the shorter lifespans in many of these groups.

14. Cause of cycle

 Family background
 Culture of poverty

15. Family background

 A 2002 research paper titled "The Changing Effect of Family
Background on the Incomes of American Adults" analysed
changes in the determinants of family income between 1961
and 1999, focusing on the effect of parental
education, occupational rank, income, marital status, family
size, region of residence, race, and ethnicity. The paper outlines
a simple framework for thinking about how family background
affects children’s family and income, summarizes previous
research on trends in intergenerational inheritance in the
United States, describes the data used as a basis for the
research which it describes, discusses trends in inequality
among parents, describes how the effects of parental inequality
changed between 1961 and 1999, contrasts effects at the top and
bottom of the distribution, and discusses whether
intergenerational correlations of zero would be desirable.

16. Culture of poverty

 Another theory for the perpetual cycle of poverty is that poor people have
their own culture with a different set of values and beliefs which keep
them trapped within that cycle generation to generation. This theory has
been explored by Ruby K. Payne in her book A Framework for
Understanding Poverty. In this book she explains how there is a class
system in the United States where there is a wealthy upper class, a middle
class, and the working poor class. These classes each have their own set of
rules and values which differ from each other. In order to understand the
culture of poverty and how the poor class’s set of rules tend to keep them
trapped in this continual cycle Payne describes these rules and how they
affect the poor class. Time is something that is treated differently by the
poor; they generally do not plan ahead but simply live in the moment
which keeps them from saving money which will help their children
escape poverty. Payne expresses how important it is when working with
the poor to understand their unique cultural differences so that one does
not get frustrated but instead tries to work with them on their ideologies
and help them to understand how they can help themselves and their
children escape the cycle.

17. The end
