What is poverty? Let's take a look at some statistics: About 50% of the world’s population lives on less than the equivalent of $2 a day. That represents a staggering number of over 2.8 billion people. Of these, about half live on less than $1 a day. In addition to poverty, there are the devastating effects of disease that plague the poorest nations like Rwanda.
At the end of 2002, an estimated 42 million people around the world were living with HIV / AIDS, of which over 30 million of these people live in Sub Saharan Africa. Last year more than 3 million people died from malaria and tuberculosis combined.
There is a tragic correlation between poverty, disease and unemployment. These statistics are made worse by the knowledge that the richest 20% of the world’s population own approximately 80% of the world’s wealth.
However, despite the one trillion US$ given by rich countries in aid to poor countries since 1950, and debt relief on $33 billion of loans, the share of world income of the poorest fifth of the planet’s population has halved in the past 40 years. Or to put it another way, Africa is 25% poorer now than it was 20 years ago.
First of all what is poverty? A dictionary definition of poverty can be defined as having a great lack of money or resources. But what really is poverty?
Having lived in a developed nation, the United Kingdom, for 27 years, where the average wage is around $3000 per month, and those who do not have jobs receive money from the government, it is safe to say that no-one is financially poor compared to the majority of people in Rwanda.
But in the UK a significantly higher number of people commit suicide, divorce their husbands / wives, rob each other, have children taking drugs, and are severely depressed, compared to Rwanda. Churches throughout the UK are closing because no-one goes to them anymore – in fact only about 3-4% of the whole population go to church every Sunday, and many of those do not have a personal walk with Jesus.
So in many ways other than financial (e.g. morally, emotionally, socially and spiritually) the UK is much poorer than Rwanda.
Hundreds of books have been written on the subject of poverty in all its myriad meanings. In this article, however, I’m focusing on financial poverty - why are so many people in the world poor and hungry, while those in rich countries throw away millions of tons of food because they’ve produced too much and cannot sell it? And what does God think about all of this?
Darrow Miller, in his book ‘Discipling Nations’, asks the same question. He says that except for catastrophic events such as war, drought, floods, earthquakes etc., physical poverty doesn’t ‘just happen’. He says it’s the logical result of the way people look at themselves and the world, the stories that they tell to make sense of their world.
