Blog Action Day 2008 - Poverty
“Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life”
- Nelson Mandela
Today is Blog Action Day — thousands of bloggers will unite to discuss a single issue - poverty. We aim to raise awareness, initiate action and to shake the web!
While writing this blog post I thought I’d try and find some statistics on poverty, below is a list of countries where over 50% of the population lives on less than 2 USD a day:
Bangladesh, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Ghana, Haiti, India, Kenya, Laos, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe
You’ll notice that this list is predominantly African nations, but India also stood out to me with no less than 77% of the population living under that 2 USD/day poverty line. That essentially means that for the cost of my flight out there in a couple of days (or a low-end Apple MacBook, HD camcorder, a MAX ticket at full price or less than a CS4 Web Premium license for that matter) can keep a person out of extreme poverty for a year and a half.
This admittedly isn’t the complete picture on poverty, if you measure this by the percentage of people that live under the national poverty line set by their government the situation looks a little less bleak.
The theme for this years Blog Action Day reminded me of an entertaining and thought-provoking TED talk by Hans Rosling I recently watched. I thought I’d include it here for you to see.
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I urge everyone to get involved with todays Blog Action Day and contribute to making poverty history!
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License.
In the UK, 1% of the population holds 20% of the total wealth.
In the US, 1% of the population holds 33% of the total wealth.
Worldwide, 1% of the population holds 40% of the wealth.
Worldwide, the bottom 50% of the population only holds 1% of the wealth.
(http://tinyurl.com/4dmmcc)
The population of Colombia appears to be the poorest where they have to work 97 minutes to earn enough to eat 1 Big Mac, according to a variant of the BMI (Big Mac Index).
Bogotá, Colombia - 97 minutes
Nairobi, Kenya - 91 minutes
Jakarta, Indonesia - 86 minutes
Lima, Peru - 86 minutes
Caracas, Venezuela - 85 minutes
Mexico City, Mexico - 82 minutes
Manila, Philippines - 81 minutes
Mumbai, India - 70 minutes
Sofia, Bulgaria - 69 minutes
Bucharest, Romania - 69 minutes
Thanks Peter
Well, I’m from Mexico and I can tell you that there a lot people, heads of a family, earning 55 pesos ( around 4.5 USD ) for an entirely work day, 8 hours to be specific. I don’t know how they manage to feed an entire family of at least 3 or 4 members.
And if things were not bad already, this financial crisis is going to make it even worst, specially for latin american economies, were politicians don’t give a penny about people , as long as they keep on filling their pockets with BIG amounts of money (some of them, well a lot, earn about 20K USD per month for doing nothing). Just to mention an example, one of our politicians, who is the leader of the Education Workers Union, just gave away 50 hummers to her friends ( antoher corrupt leaders of the union), how on earth a person working for the gov. can afford that.
Anyway, things are very bad.