Can Poverty Ever Be Eradicated?

Since the last decade, the world has seen massive technological advances, economic growth and socio-economic development. With all these positives stacked towards human growth, there is a significant amount of negative stimuli that still lingers around poverty and growth of those communities.

These stimuli seem to develop more and more as many charities and non-governmental organisations are still fighting towards poverty in different parts of the world. With all these activities still running, we are inevitably forced to ask this question:

Can Poverty Ever Be Eradicated?

The truth of the matter is that poverty has significantly reduced in the past 25 years. To bring things into better perspective, statistics on poverty reduction has to be analysed.

Since the last 25 years, the newspapers could have shown “Number of people in extreme poverty fell by 1,37,000 since yesterday” and they would have been right.

Yes. You read it right.

Every day, for the past 25 years, 1.37 lakh people overcome extreme poverty. Since 1990, 1.2 billion people have overcome extreme poverty. Yet, no newspapers have published any headlines stating these amazing facts. The reasons are self-explanatory.

Lifting people from extreme poverty is not enough. Most of these people require more tools and support to improve into a lifestyle where self-sufficiency can be achieved. But this is just the start.

To emphasise better on how countries have transformed economic growth, examples of India and China can be drawn.

India

India, at the year 1990, had over 371 million people living under extreme poverty line. Over the course of 25 years with a stable and steadily growing economy, India was able to decrease this amount to just below 100 million (98 million, to be exact) and push about 273 million people above the extreme poverty line.

China

The largest wave of economic growth has been witnessed in the most-populated nation in the world, too. This growth has been considered as an excellent example for economic growth and serves as a glaring hope that poverty CAN be eradicated and is not inevitable.

China has seen a whopping 95% decrease in people suffering from extreme poverty from 754 million at 1990 to 39 million at 2017. This has largely been credited to the hard work done by the people and government of China.

What next?

With help increasing towards eradication of poverty and many charities and countries coming together to help improve the stigma around poverty, it is possible to make significant changes towards improving the economy around poverty affected areas.

More care and rigorous regulation towards improving families affected by this nature and improving lives of the next generation of children that come through those families must be of atmost focus to effectively improve these conditions.