General Stats

Poverty Facts

• Children under age 18 make up 49 percent of the population of the world’s least developed countries, compared with 21 percent of the population of the world’s industrialized nations.
• More than 2 billion people lack access to electricity and modern forms of energy.
• More than 1 billion (one in five) people live on less than U.S.$1 a day.
• Every day, 1,600 women and more than 10,000 newborns globally die due to complications that could have been prevented.
• The annual world economy breaks down like this:
  Low Income, $825 or less: 37%
  Lower Middle Income, $826 to $3,255: 38%
  Upper Middle Income, $3,256 to $10,065: 9%
  High Income, $10,066 or more: 16%
• Approximately 143 million children in the developing world (one in 13) are orphans.
• More than 10 million children under age 5 die each year. Two-thirds of these deaths - more than 6 million deaths every year — are preventable.
• Approximately 41 percent of the world’s poor people live in India.

Sources:
www.unicef.org
www.unep.org
www.one.org
www.who.int
www.freeworldacademy.com
www.nationmaster.com

Hunger Facts

• One person in seven goes to bed hungry every day.
• Approximately 854 million people across the world are hungry.
• Every day, nearly 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes. That amounts to one child every 5 seconds.
• About 5.6 million or 53 percent of child deaths worldwide are related to under-nutrition.
• Approximately 146 million or 27 percent of children under age 5 in developing countries are underweight.
• Nearly 17 percent of babies in developing countries are born with a low birth weight compared with only 7 percent of babies in industrialized countries.
• More than 6 million children die from malnutrition each year.
• Worldwide, 161 million preschool children suffer chronic malnutrition.
• Already 40 percent to 50 percent of the world’s populations are undernourished and there are 50 million starvation-related deaths each year.

Sources:
www.unicef.org
www.unep.org
www.one.org
www.who.int
www.bread.org

Water Facts

• Depending on the climate, physical activity and culture, drinking-water needs for individuals vary, but for high-consumption consumers it is an estimated 2 quarts per day for a 130-pound person and 1 quart per day for a 22-pound child.
• Roughly one-sixth of the world’s population, or 1.1 billion people, do not have access to safe water.
• About 2.6 billion people in the world do not have access to adequate sanitation, roughly two-fifths of the world’s population.
• Approximately 1.8 million children die every year as a result of diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation. This amounts to around 5,000 deaths a day.
• The simple act of washing hands with soap and water can reduce diarrheal diseases by more than 40 percent.
• Water-related disease is the second biggest killer of children worldwide, after acute respiratory infections such as tuberculosis.
• Approximately 97.5 percent of the earth’s water is saltwater. If the world’s water fit into a bucket, only 1 teaspoonful would be drinkable.
• Around 90 percent of incidences of water-related diseases are due to unsafe water supply, sanitation and hygiene, and most victims are children in developing countries.
• The average person in the developing world uses 2.6 gallons of water every day for drinking, washing and cooking. This is the same amount used in the average flush of a toilet.
• Agriculture accounts for more than 80 percent of the world’s water consumption.
• Approximately 21.1 percent of children live in developing countries without safe water.

Sources:
www.wateraid.org
www.who.int
www.unicef.org

United Nations Human Development Reports

The Human Development Report is an independent report. It is commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and is the product of a selected team of leading scholars, development practitioners and members of the Human Development Report Office of UNDP. The teams were led by Mahbub ul Haq and Inge Kaul from 1990 through 1994; by Mahbub ul Haq and Sakiko Fukuda-Parr in 1995, by Richard Jolly and Sakiko Fukuda-Parr from 1996 through 2000, and by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr with Nancy Birdsall from 2001 through 2003. In 2004, Kevin Watkins joined as Director of the Human Development Report Office, thereby taking the role of Lead Author for the Reports of 2005 until 2007/2008. The Report is translated into more than a dozen languages and launched in more than 100 countries annually.

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World Bank's World Development Reports

The World Bank's annual World Development Report (WDR) is a guide to the economic, social and environmental state of the world today. Each year the WDR provides in depth analysis of a specific aspect of development. Past reports have considered such topics as agriculture, youth, equity, public services delivery, the role of the state, transition economies, labor, infrastructure, health, the environment, and poverty. The reports are the Bank's best-known contribution to thinking about development.

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U.S. Census Bureau Poverty Reports

The U.S. Census Bureau compiles data on various sociological trends in the population, including poverty. It gives detailed information on how the data was compiled, defined, and analyzed.

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