Poverty

Creating and Developing Awareness

What Does Poverty Look Like?

• The measurement for extreme poverty of $1.90 per day (per person) is used by The World Health Organization (WHO), The World Bank and the United Nations (UN).

• FINCA an organization that “serves the “unbanked” by providing access to basic financial services and enabling full participation in the economy for the poor” claims 3 billion worldwide live on $2.50 a day. They also offer the following statics:

• The UN puts the number of people living in extreme poverty at 700 million worldwide who struggle to fulfil the most basic needs like health, education and access to water and sanitation.

• Poverty many dimensions causes as noted in the UN pdf No Poverty: Why It Matters are:

• The UN shows about 400 million people do not have access to essential health services and about 6% of low and middle income countries are tipped into poverty because of health care spending

• Where does extreme poverty exist (actionagainsthunger.org)

383 Million in Africa out of total population of 1.216B or 31%
327 Million in Asia out of total population of 4.436B or 7.4%
19 Million in South America out of total population 427.5M or 4%
13 Million in North America out of total population of 579M or 2%
2.5 Million in Oceania out of total population of 29.2M or 8.6%
0.7 Million in Europe out of total population of 743M or 9%

Care.org site states the stats in the boxes below related to the state of poverty in the world. People who must manage the day-to-day existence are ripe to be exploited in so many ways.

Poverty places a heavy burden on people whose only thoughts are to survive from day-to-day. Psychologist believe people who are poor develop psychological phenomenon of scarcity. An article from the American Psychological Association (www.apa.org/monitor/2014/02/scarcity.aspx) claims that being poor requires so much mental energy just to figure out how to survive that people cannot focus on things like planning ahead, problem solving or issues that don’t involve immediate survive.

This preoccupation with immediate survival also opens the door to being taken advantage of or being scapegoated for society ills.

Every psychologist understands that we have very limited cognitive space and bandwidth. When you focus heavily on one thing, there is just less mind to devote to other things. We call it tunneling — as you devote more and more to dealing with scarcity you have less and less for other things in your life, some of which are very important for dealing with scarcity. There's a lot of literature showing that poor people don't do as well in many areas of their lives. They are often less attentive parents than those who have more money, they're worse at adhering to their medication than the rich, and even poor farmers weed their fields less well than those who are less poor. (psychologist Eldar Shafir)

Because of the tunneling effect, poor people don’t have the space to campaign for issues that would improve their lives, protect their rights and liberties. In addition, many cultures operate on a mindset of scarcity as well. They fight to protect certain rights and liberties for a select group of people which translates to limiting those rights and liberties to other groups of people who are not like them in certain ways.

The children of poor people are less likely to receive education. The poorest are four time less likely than the richest children to be enrolled in primary education across developing countries. Among the estimated 780 million illiterate adults worldwide, neatly two-thirds are women. Poor people face higher risk of malnutrition and death in childhood. Source.

Educate, Inform and Create Inspiration

• The well-being of humans are linked to each other
• Inequality is a detriment to economic growth
• Undermines social cohesion
• Increases political and social tensions
• In some circumstances drives instability and conflicts.
• The UN, The World Bank and other major international organizations have a goal to end extreme poverty worldwide by 2030
• The poverty rate has been declining over the years according to the World Bank:

in 2012, 12.4% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty

in 2013, it declined to 10.7%

• Myths about poverty found on Charter for Compassion website produced by WYNC’s On The Media is a series of podcasts of that “uses the voices of individuals and complexities of history to lay open the tales we tell ourselves about poverty.

What This Looks Like in Real Life (Stories and Case Studies)

Brandi Drew, National Public Radio (NPR) Hidden Brain

NPR’s podcast Hidden Brain, broadcast a story about a woman named Brandi Drew and how the cycle of poverty impacted her ability to look past the day-to-day survive to make decisions that could help her improve her life in the future. Below is a partial copy of the transcript for the story:

“…when you realize something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that one thing. Maybe it's money you're lacking or time or love or just the latest gadget that other people seem to have. Two researchers have looked into how we respond to scarcity as they call it. They say scarcity touches on many aspects of our lives. Here's NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam.

SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Six years ago, Brandi Drew was working at a senior living facility in Michigan. She'd been with her employer for more than a decade. One day, she made a mistake.

BRANDI DREW: I was just in a rush to get home, that was all, because day care closes at 6. I get off at 5. It was, like, maybe a 10-mile drive, busy traffic area, and I knew I had to pick up diapers, and the easiest thing for me I thought would be to pick them up before I picked the baby up.

VEDANTAM: So Brandi stopped at a store, grabbed the diapers and swiped her credit card at the self-checkout station. It wasn't until later that she discovered that she had used the wrong card, not her own but the company credit card.

DREW: My supervisor called me in and said, hey, what's this purchase? So had she not said anything, I don't think I would have realized that.

VEDANTAM: Brandi thought an apology and an explanation would do. Her boss said no. Brandi was fired.

DREW: I just cried. I cried for, like, a whole day because I couldn't believe it. I didn't want to go home and tell my kids what had happened. I didn't want to tell my husband what had happened. I just didn't know what to do at that point. I felt like a - I felt like a failure as a parent because I didn't provide a good example even though it was a mistake.

VEDANTAM: Brandi tried to bring in money doing odd jobs, but the stress grew. To make ends meet, she ordered a new credit 

card. The day it arrived, she ran straight out the door to Wal-Mart.

DREW: And I bought, like, a family size of toilet paper, a family size of laundry detergent. Like, I stocked up on things all at once rather than keeping it handy just in case. So I, like, maxed it out within the first couple of days that I had it rather than holding on to it for emergency purposes.

VEDANTAM: In that moment, as she was maxing out the credit card on the household supplies she needed, Brandi forgot about things that was slightly less pressing.

DREW: What I didn't think about is what about gas money? I didn't consider what gas would cost. That was, like, the biggest thing. It was always hard to have gas.

VEDANTAM: And of course, there was the credit card bill itself.

DREW: By the time I paid it off, it was over $800 for a $500 card.

VEDANTAM: Brandi had always been careful and conscientious. So why did she make these mistakes? One explanation - the psychological phenomenon of scarcity.

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN: When you have scarcity, and it creates a scarcity mindset, it leads you to take certain behaviors which, in the short term, help you manage scarcity but in the long term, only make matters worse.” Source.  

The Unseen, A Documentary on David Maskew