People who live in poverty often find it difficult to try to better themselves and often think only of survival for themselves and their families. For example, many people in developing countries live in a rural area as a tenant with an absentee landlord. If they improve the land and begin to make a profit they risk being evicted as the landlord may want to use the improved land for himself. For this reason they often reject modern methods of farming only to be stereotyped as lazy or unintelligent.
Children across the world are often socialised into this culture of poverty and the issue is complicated. The level of developmental risks that children face varies enormously and is influenced by the depth and duration of family poverty. Even among the long term poor risks to development vary according to physical and mental health of parents, the availability of social support from outside the family, where they live and even the basic resilience of the children.
Poverty is a cycle which is hard to break, with children raised in poverty often becoming poor themselves because their families are unable to invest what is needed to overcome their problems. This is not only to do with finances but also the fact that the parents may not have knowledge of the help they are entitled to. This occurs because the poorest communities often have the poorest health and education services, and this is highlighted by the fact that across the world there are currently 125 million children who have never seen the inside of a classroom. With education levels being lower in areas of high poverty, people living in these areas are not qualified for the high paying jobs. High skilled jobs are beyond the reach of some people, and those securing these high paid jobs are finding their way out of these areas. Children being raised in poverty may be socialised into living off the welfare state and often live in areas of high unemployment. For this reason they see little point in getting a good formal education. Part of this problem appears to be the amount of parents bringing up children alone. Around 61 per cent of children who spent the first ten years of their life in a single parent family lived below the poverty line for most of that time, and only 7 per cent avoided poverty altogether.
In the UK figures show that the number of people in households with an income of below 60 per cent of average income fell from 14 million in 1997 to 13 million in 2001 (the same as for the year 1995), and the number of children in low income households fell by 500,000 over the same period. It is believed that the main reason for this fall was that more people were in paid work in 2001, but employment does not guarantee an escape from poverty. Apart from pensioners, almost half of all adults and children below the low income threshold were living in households where at least on adult is employed.
Poverty within the family can change along with the changes the family unit makes over time. A single person in paid employment may be living in poverty but if they marry someone who is also working their living expenses could fall, for example their outgoings for rent, gas and electricity could be shared. If they then go on to have a child, they would then become a single income family even if for only a short time, and this would mean a fall in income. When the children are older they may leave home meaning that the parents would again have a higher income, only for it to fall again at retirement. As statistic show 21 per cent of those living on a low income are over 60 years of age.
The World Development Report is the World Banks contribution to an ongoing dialogue on sustainable development and makes interesting reading. I 1990 the international community set up plans to eliminate poverty in the world by the year 2015, and set specific goals to be achieved by that date. The goals were set up according to studies done beforehand that pinpointed the major poverty areas of the world.
Once the goals were decided and the plans set in motion it was discovered that they were not doing as well as planned. One of the goals was to cut income poverty by half, and this could be achieved if it decreased by 2.7 per cent annually between 1990 and 2015, but studies showed that between 1990 and 1998 it only decreased by 1.7 per cent annually. The failure to achieve their objectives was mainly due to the fact that the inequalities of the world had been ignored. Inequality in distribution of income, in culture and religious conditions, and just too many other inequalities of life to be able to control or conform to a generalised plan.
After going back to the drawing board a new plan was set which could be adapted to each community according to its individual needs and included, promoting opportunity, facilitating empowerment and enhancing security. In promoting opportunity the plan is to make it easier for people to start their own business, make the market investor friendly and control expanding international trade. They want to make sure poor people have equal opportunities in education, health and other services, keeping in mind ethnic, racial and gender differences. In facilitating empowerment governments should make all state institutions, actions and plans available for the scrutiny of everyone and it is hoped that this will make people feel more in control of their own lives. Enhancing security for poor people is vital if any sort of order is to be maintained in their lives and could include homes for the homeless or shelters for abused women. This would also include organisation for a national crisis such as earth quakes, recession or civil war because it is the poor who get hit hardest by these events. In this proposed plan all countries would apply all these things internationally as well as nationally.
A study carried out in the late 60’s by Peter Townsend isolated groups of people who were at high risk of living in poverty. The list was, one person households, large families, lower class people who tended to work in poor conditions, the unemployed, the disabled, one parent families and old people. Recent statistics show that additions to this list should be women, ethnic groups, children and even home owners and the employed. As a note on the majority of government statistics it states that “it only covers people living in private households and excludes those in residential institutions, nursing homes, sleeping rough or in bed and breakfast accommodation”, so perhaps we should add these too.
The World development Report ends on the note “If our strategy goes as planned, with the help of all the different parties, with the poor being the most active, then the world has a really good chance of eliminating poverty.”
With the list of those at risk of living in poverty increasing all we can do is wait and see.
