In 2012, the Salvation Army found that more than a quarter of Americans surveyed believed the poor were impoverished by virtue of their own laziness, rather than unavoidable external conditions. For such an important issue, it seems that people know little about it – perhaps because so much of the world’s poor population resides outside the U.S. borders.
Almost 13 percent of the world’s population lives at or below $1.90 a day. According to the United Nations, “more than 1 billion in the world today, the great majority of whom are women, live in unacceptable conditions of poverty.”
The good news, say advocacy organizations and academics, is not only is extreme poverty not an intractable problem, but the solutions may be within reach.
It starts by bridging the gender gap.
The Caterpillar Foundation, whose mission is “to alleviate poverty and place people on the path to prosperity,” understands this. Funding for the Foundation’s work comes from the proceeds of Caterpillar Inc.’s products, which in themselves help to address poverty by building a better future. One of the Foundation’s key pillars is that you can’t just heal the symptoms, you need to affect the cause: alleviating poverty means eliminating gender inequality.
“When you think about the success of a family and success of a community, the women and the girls are critical,” said Michele Sullivan, president of the Caterpillar Foundation. When a woman “is empowered, she is successful. She is an engineer; she is whatever it is she wants to be. Because of that, the world is going to benefit because her odds of succeeding and her family succeeding are greater than ever. That’s how you get to the root cause of issues.”
Across the globe, women get paid less than men, and have fewer opportunities to start a business or get an education.
Experts say that by increasing access to energy resources, agriculture empowerment, education, and reproductive health care, social and economic barriers can be lifted to help bring women (and their families) out of poverty.
“No matter how you cut it, it is simply harder for girls and women who live and grow up in extreme poverty,” said Ian Koski, communications director of ONE, a campaigning and advocacy organization focused on poverty and preventable disease. “If we invest in them they will grow up and strengthen their communities.”
A grant partner of the Caterpillar Foundation, ONE argues that if that inequality can be neutralized – with women able to reach their full social, economic and legal potential – then a major contributor to poverty would be removed.
Research backs this up. For example, according to the United Nations, if women farmers were given equitable access to productive resources – say, land or livestock – the number of the world’s hungry could be diminished by as much as 150 million.
The lack of education is another barrier to women’s upward mobility. However, by equalizing access to basic schooling – elementary-level education – and ensuring that all students in low-income countries graduate with basic reading skills, global extreme poverty could be cut by as much as 12 percent, according to UNESCO. The World Bank contends that with each year a girl spends in school, a cascading effect occurs: better family planning, which may lead to fewer children, leading to more gainful employment, leading to higher wages. “If you provide any adult, or young adult, access to resources – whether it be in the form of better access to markets, better access to capital, better access to land, better access to healthcare, education – it’s going to help lift people out of poverty,” said David Sahn, a professor of economics at Cornell University. Key health interventions for women and children are also vital for them to escape poverty, as is having more control over reproductive health. A World Health Organization report found that a sub-Saharan African woman is 47 times more likely to die of maternal causes than an American woman. But give a woman the power to use a contraceptive, and the maternal death rates are cut by 44 percent. Another recent report found that if investments are made in women’s and children’s health – just $5 per person per year for the next 20 years across 74 developing countries – we might see a nine times return on investment in economic and social benefits. As ONE’s Koski put it, investing in women is not only the right thing to do, morally, but also makes a great deal of sense from an economic perspective. “Girls and women are how we are going to end extreme poverty,” he said.
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