Global Poverty

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Global poverty to fall from 29% in 1999 to less than 10%...

Extreme poverty to fall below 10 percent
Tue, Oct 06, 2015 - Extreme poverty will this year fall to less than 10 percent of the global population for the first time, although there is still “great concern” for millions in Africa, a World Bank report said on Sunday.

“This is the best story in the world today — these projections show us that we are the first generation in human history that can end extreme poverty,” said Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, which holds its annual meetings from Friday to Sunday in Lima, Peru, along with the IMF. According to World Bank projections, about 702 million people, or 9.6 percent of the world population, will live below the poverty line this year, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. In 2012, that number stood at 902 million, or about 13 percent of the world population. It stood at 29 percent in 1999.

Kim said the continuing decline in extreme poverty is the result of dynamic economic growth in developing nations and investment in health and education, as well as social safety nets that prevented millions of people from falling back into poverty. “This new forecast of poverty falling into the single digits should give us new momentum and help us focus even more clearly on the most effective strategies to end extreme poverty,” he said. Previously, people living on US$1.25 or less a day were defined as living in extreme poverty. That figure is now US$1.90, to reflect inflation.

The report comes after world leaders last month pledged to end extreme poverty within 15 years, adopting an ambitious set of UN goals to be backed up by trillions of dollars in development spending. Releasing the figures, the World Bank nevertheless urged caution, saying “major hurdles remain” in the goal to end poverty by 2030. “The growing concentration of global poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa is of great concern,” it said in a statement. “While some African countries have seen significant successes in reducing poverty, the region as a whole lags the rest of the world in the pace of lessening poverty.” The report singled out Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as particularly worrisome examples of deprivation in Africa.

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Using Artificial Intelligence to Spot, Map Poverty...

Artificial Intelligence Can Spot, Map Poverty, Researchers Say
August 18, 2016 — A new technique using artificial intelligence to read satellite images could aid efforts to eradicate global poverty by indicating where help is needed most, a team of U.S. researchers said Thursday.

The method would assist governments and charities trying to fight poverty but lacking precise, reliable information on where poor people are living and what they need, said the researchers, based at Stanford University in California. Eradicating extreme poverty, measured as people living on less than $1.25 U.S. a day, by 2030 is among the sustainable development goals that U.N. member states adopted last year. A team of computer scientists and satellite experts created a self-updating world map to locate poverty, said Marshall Burke, assistant professor in Stanford's Department of Earth System Science.

A woman holds her malnourished child at a feeding center at al-Sabyeen hospital in Yemen's capital, Sana'a.​

It uses a computer algorithm that recognizes signs of poverty through a process called machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, he said. Results of the two-year research effort have been published in the journal Science. The system shows an image to a computer, "and the computer's job is to figure what the image is," Burke said. The computer was initially fed data from household surveys by five African nations — Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Malawi and Rwanda — and nighttime satellite imagery of the same countries. Nighttime images are a basic tool to predict poverty because a higher intensity of nightlight is associated with higher levels of development.

Daytime images

The computer was asked to use the data to spot signs of poverty in a separate set of high-resolution daytime satellite images that contain information from poor regions that otherwise appear dark in night photos. "The computer learns to find a lot of things that we think are correlated to poverty like roads, urban areas, farmlands and waterways," said Burke. Burke said the team plans to create a worldwide poverty map that would be publicly available online. "We hope our data will be directly useful by governments around the world ... to more effectively target their programs," Burke said.

The project improves upon use of household surveys, which tend to sample villages randomly, he said. "They are able to get only, say, 500 villages in a country as large as Tanzania, which has hundreds of thousands of villages," he said. Also, according to the World Bank, only 25 of 48 nations in sub-Saharan Africa conducted two household surveys or more between 1990 and 2012.

Artificial Intelligence Can Spot, Map Poverty, Researchers Say

 

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20% of developing world children in extreme poverty...

Unicef: Fifth of developing world children in extreme poverty
Tue, 04 Oct 2016 - Nearly a fifth of children in developing countries live in extreme poverty, the World Bank and the UN's children's agency say.

The children - nearly 385m in total - were in households making $1.90 (£1.45) a day or less, the report said. They include half the children in sub-Saharan Africa and more than a third of those in South Asia.

Sudanese child in impoverished east of country​

Unicef and the World Bank have called on governments in affected countries to do more to help children. "Children are not only more likely to be living in extreme poverty; the effects of poverty are most damaging to children," Anthony Lake of Unicef said. "They are the worst off of the worst off and the youngest children are the worst off of all, because the deprivations they suffer affect the development of their bodies and their minds." The UN has set a target of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030.

Unicef: Fifth of developing world children in extreme poverty - BBC News