Escaping poverty, illiteracy won’t defeat inequality, says UN report
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SCORES of nations have lifted themselves out of poverty and illiteracy, but those signs of broad progress hide crippling inequality and suffering by millions of people left behind, a United Nations agency said yesterday.
One in three people are malnourished, more than one in 10 live in extreme poverty and roughly the same number can neither read nor write, says the Human Development Report issued by the United Nations Development Program yesterday.
And the world’s richest 1 percent hold nearly half the world’s wealth.
Progress must be universal, said the UNDP.
“People now live longer, more children are in school and more people have access to basic social services,” the report said.
“Yet human development has been uneven, and human deprivations persist. Progress has bypassed groups, communities, societies — and people have been left out.”
Measuring nations in terms of life expectancy, levels of education and standard of living, the UNDP report used a so-called Human Development Index and compared its 2015 results with those it collected in its first report in 1990.
Every developing nation improved over those 25 years, it said.
The number of countries ranking high on the index rose to 51 from 11 and the number at the low end fell to 41 from 62.
But strip away national boundaries, and a third of the world’s population ranks low on that scale, it said.
“The unfortunate reality is that millions of people fall on the wrong side of the average and struggle with hunger, poverty, illiteracy and malnutrition,” it said.
Among positive signs, the global extreme poverty rate (US$1.90 a day) was estimated at roughly 11 percent, down from 35 percent.
The mortality rate for children under age 5 was cut by more than half, and in developing regions, the proportion of undernourished people was nearly halved.
But 766 million people, half of them children, still live in extreme poverty. In the developed world, more than a third of children live in poverty.
People in rural areas are far more likely to be poor than those in urban areas, and twice as many rural children as urban children are out of school.
“Countries’ human development may improve, but this does not mean that entire populations are better off or benefit equally,” the report said.
Only 10-20 percent of landholders in developing countries are women. And more women than men live in poverty — 117 women for every 100 men in Latin America and the Caribbean, it said.
The world’s 370 million indigenous people are 5 percent of the global population but 15 percent of the people living in poverty.
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