POVERTY AND EDUCATION

Poverty and Education

Introduction

Poverty refers to the condition of lacking basic human needs such as nutrition, clean water, healthcare, clothing, and shelter because of the inability to afford them. This is alternatively referred to using the terms absolute poverty or destitution. Relative poverty, in contrast, is the condition of having fewer resources or less income compared with others within a society or a country.

Poverty is deprivation of material essentials such as food, shelter, drinking water, and clothing. It is also associated with the lack of education, freedom, and dignity. The uneven distribution of poverty at various scales, from the global to the household, via the national, regional, and local, suggests the importance of geographic factors in explaining its prevalence and understanding its nature. (Barro, Robert, Jong-Wha, 2000)

Discussion

Although the United States and Canada are the most advanced industrialized countries in the world, they have the highest child poverty rates in the industrialized world. Some children are poor because their parents are working and are yet poor. Other poor children live with single mothers or recent immigrants. Children living in poverty experience increased strain on their physical, emotional, psychological, and social well-being. That said there are some industrialized nations that have reduced child poverty rates through a number of programs and policies. (Brossard, Mathieu, Luc-Charles, 2001)

Poverty varies both demographically and geographically. In 2004, there were close to 1 billion people in the world living on less than $1 per day, a decrease of 250 million since 1990 and a step toward reaching the United Nations' Millennium Development Goal of reducing extreme poverty by half by 2015. Poverty, however, is not distributed evenly. Most of its recent decline can be attributed to East Asian countries. Although the majority of poor people remain in South Asia, poverty has increased most rapidly in sub-Saharan Africa, where almost 300 million people, or 41% of the population, live on less than $1 per day. Poverty recently increased in Western Asia and remains fairly constant in Latin America. Many Latin American countries such as Ecuador, Argentina, and Nicaragua fare better on the HPI than on income poverty. This contrasts with African countries such as Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Senegal, and Burkina Faso, where the HPI rankings are worse than expected, given the poverty rates. Some of the gains in absolute poverty are overshadowed by increases in inequality and worsening relative poverty in most of the developing world, where the poorest quintile accounts for less than 4% of national consumption. Inequality is particularly acute in Latin America, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Although extreme poverty is virtually nonexistent in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, national measures indicate the presence of economic deprivation. For example, in the United States in 2006, 38.8 million people, or 13.3% of the population, fell below the federal poverty line. Of course, important variations exist within regions and nations. Although poverty rates are usually higher in rural areas, a large and growing number of poor people live in urbanized areas, with a significant degree of concentration and clustering in specific neighborhoods and informal settlements. Throughout the world, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities; indigenous populations; and women and children are more likely to suffer ...