3 billion poor people earn less than $2 a day, and another 3 billion people are likely to be added to the population of developing countries by 2050.

In 1999, there were 1.2 billion people living on less than $1 a day (600 million of them children), 46.7% of them live in Sub-Saharan Africa, or 300 million people.

An estimated 12 percent of the people living in the richest countries in the world are affected by poverty.

The average income in the richest 20 countries is now 37 times that in the poorest 20. This ratio has doubled in the past 40 years, mainly because of lack of growth in the poorest countries.

The world’s richest 1% of people receive as much income as the poorest 57%.

The richest 10% of the U.S. population has an income equal to that of the poorest 43% of the world, or the income of the richest 25 million Americans is equal to that of almost 2 billion people.

The income of the world’s richest 5% is 114 times that of the poorest 5%.

About 820 million people lack access to enough food to lead healthy and productive lives, and about 160 million children are seriously underweight for their age.

Over the next 30 to 50 years, rural areas will have to feed an additional 2 to 3 billion people globally, and substantially improve the diets of the 2.5 to 3 billion people living on less than $2 a day.

70 percent of the world’s poor live in the countryside.

Of the 6.2 billion people in today’s world, 1.2 billion live on less than $1 per day.

70% of the 1.2 billion people living in poverty are female.

More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished – 799 million of them are from the developing world. More than 153 million of them are under the age of 5.

Nearly 120 million primary-school age children are not in school, 53% of them girls.

6 million children under the age of 5 die every year as a result of hunger.

For 70 percent of children who die before their fifth birthday the cause is a disease or combination of diseases and malnutrition that would be readily preventable in a high-income country: acute respiratory infections, diarrhea, measles, and malaria.

Each day in the developing world, more than 30,000 children die from mostly preventable and treatable causes such as diarrhea, acute respiratory infections, measles or malaria.

Every year over 5 million children ages 0 to 14 die, mainly in the developing world, from diseases related to their environments - the places where they live, learn and play. These diseases include diarrhea, malaria as well as other vector-borne diseases, acute respiratory infections and unintentional injuries (accidents).
Half a million women die unnecessarily from pregnancy-related complications each year, the causes of which are exacerbated by issues of poverty and remoteness.

Poverty, particularly for women, is more than income deficiency. Women continue to lag behind men in control over the means of production such as cash, credit and collateral: but they are also disadvantaged by other forms of impoverishment in areas such as literacy, education skills, employment opportunities, mobility, political representation, and pressures on their available time and energy linked to role responsibilities.

14 million children currently under 15 years old have lost one or both parents to AIDS.

The Ultimate Challenge:

As Catholics, we must come together with a common conviction that we can no longer tolerate the moral scandal of poverty in our land and so much hunger and deprivation in our world. As believers, we can debate how best to overcome these realities, but we must be united in our determination to do so. Our faith teaches us that poor people are not issues or problems but sisters and brothers in God’s one human family.

The causes of poverty are complex - as are the solutions. Yet, there is much we can do, as individuals and as community groups, to work with other Catholics to address the root causes of poverty. But the first step to solving any problem is understanding it - educating ourselves and others about the true state of poverty, its enormity, conditions and effects.

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