Investing in people.

PositionEliminating poverty - Includes related articles on Preparatory Committee's progress report and social development - World Summit for Social Development

A fifth of the world's population live in absolute poverty, earning scarcely 2 per cent of the world's income. The ill-effects of this economic deprivation are often compounded by ethnic tensions and warfare, which can lead to the local displacement of people and large refugee movements. There are some 17 million refugees and 20 million displaced persons in the world today, deprived of home, health and education, their lives and livelihoods destroyed. These people add not to their nations' productivity but to their overall economic burdens.

"In the worst of instances, the survival of an entire society or nation is threatened because the essentials of life are beyond the reach of its people", concluded participants in the 46th Annual DPI/NGO Conference (8-10 September 1993, New York).

While income is the most common measure of poverty, in fact poverty is also reflected by such indicators as nutrition, life expectancy, child mortality, literacy, illness and education. More difficult to measure, but equally impoverishing of human life are insecurity due to crime or other violence, political or cultural persecution, and other limitations on basic human rights and freedoms. Most of those factors are both causes and effects of economic poverty.

In the last quarter century, statistics measuring the factors influencing poverty indicate a significant reduction in the proportion of poor people in the world. For example, health indicators showed continuous improvements in all regions, average life expectancy increased from 51 to 63 years; and primary school enrollment reached 89 per cent.

However, there have been wide regional variations: the numbers and proportion of poor people has increased in Africa, while they have decreased in East and Southeast Asia. Moreover, overall improvement in poverty-related indicators has slowed in recent years, while the number of poor people has increased, now standing at about 1.3 billion people.

Projections to the year 2000 indicate that the largest increase in that number would take place in Africa, and the gap between Africa and the rest of the world would continue to widen, noted participants in the Expert Meeting on Poverty (27-29 June, Lusaka, Zambia), the last in a triptych of meetings focusing on the core issues to be addressed by the Summit. "Unabated, the steady growth in population in the developing world would strain the capacity of the existing weak social sector ministries and dampen potential progress...

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