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Faces of Poverty Around the World
 3 billion poor people earn less than $2 a day, and another 3 billion people are likely to be added to the population of developing countries by 2050.42
In 1999, there were 1.2 billion people living on less than $1 a day (600 million of them children), 46.7% of them live in Sub-Saharan Africa, or 300 million people.43
An estimated 12 percent of the people living in the richest countries in the world are affected by poverty.44
 The average income in the richest 20 countries is now 37 times that in the poorest 20. This ratio has doubled in the past 40 years, mainly because of lack of growth in the poorest countries.45
The world's richest 1% of people receive as much income as the poorest 57%.46
The richest 10% of the U.S. population has an income equal to that of the poorest 43% of the world, or the income of the richest 25 million Americans is equal to that of almost 2 billion people.47
The income of the world's richest 5% is 114 times that of the poorest 5%.48
About 820 million people lack access to enough food to lead healthy and productive lives, and about 160 million children are seriously underweight for their age.49
Over the next 30 to 50 years, rural areas will have to feed an additional 2 to 3 billion people globally, and substantially improve the diets of the 2.5 to 3 billion people living on less than $2 a day.50
70 percent of the world's poor live in the countryside.51
Of the 6.2 billion people in today's world, 1.2 billion live on less than $1 per day.52
 70% of the 1.2 billion people living in poverty are female.53
More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished – 799 million of them are from the developing world. More than 153 million of them are under the age of 5.54
Nearly 120 million primary-school age children are not in school, 53% of them girls.55
6 million children under the age of 5 die every year as a result of hunger.56
 For 70 percent of children who die before their fifth birthday the cause is a disease or combination of diseases and malnutrition that would be readily preventable in a high-income country: acute respiratory infections, diarrhea, measles, and malaria.57
Each day in the developing world, more than 30,000 children die from mostly preventable and treatable causes such as diarrhea, acute respiratory infections, measles or malaria.58
 Every year over 5 million children ages 0 to 14 die, mainly in the developing world, from diseases related to their environments - the places where they live, learn and play. These diseases include diarrhea, malaria as well as other vector-borne diseases, acute respiratory infections and unintentional injuries (accidents).59
Half a million women die unnecessarily from pregnancy-related complications each year, the causes of which are exacerbated by issues of poverty and remoteness.60
 Poverty, particularly for women, is more than income deficiency. Women continue to lag behind men in control over the means of production such as cash, credit and collateral: but they are also disadvantaged by other forms of impoverishment in areas such as literacy, education skills, employment opportunities, mobility, political representation, and pressures on their available time and energy linked to role responsibilities.61
14 million children currently under 15 years old have lost one or both parents to AIDS.62
- World Bank, World Development Report 2003, p. xiii.
- United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2002, p. 18.
- UNICEF; UNDP; Human Development Report 1999, World Bank 1999.
- World Bank 2001i, World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty. New York: Oxford University Press.
- United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2002, p. 19.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Pinstrup-Andersen, Panya-Lorch, and Rosegrant, World Food Prospects: Critical Issues for the Early Twenty-First Century," International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC, 1999.
- World Bank, World Development Report 2003, p. 83.
- Ibid., p. 85.
- United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2002, p. 18.
- World Health Organization, Fact Sheet No. 251, June 2000.
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, State of Food Insecurity in the World 2002.
- UNICEF, The State of the World's Children 2003, p. 76.
- Ibid.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators 2002, p. 10.
- United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2002.
- Statement by the Director General of the World Health Organization on occasion of World Health Day 2003.
- World Health Organization, Fact Sheet No. 251, June 2000.
- Ibid.
- UNICEF, The State of the World's Children 2003, p. 78.
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