Unbelievably - extreme poverty is on the decline

Extreme poverty is on the decline

In the wealthy West we tend to believe that extreme poverty is endemic and is on the increase. In fact the opposite is true.

You may find it hard to believe but here are some encouraging statistics from 58:Fast Living by Scott C. Todd:

In the past eight years, the number of children dying from measles has declined by 78 per cent (from 733,000 deaths per year to 164,000) because we are completing the work of immunising every child.
Twenty-two countries have cut their malaria rate in half in only six years. They did it with insecticide-treated bed nets, access to better medicines, and spraying to kill mosquitos. Globally, malaria infections have decreased by nineteen million per year and malaria deaths have dropped by 140,000 per year between 2005 and 2009.
We used to say that forty thousand children die each day from preventable causes. In the 1990s that number dropped to thirty-three thousand per day. By 2008, it dropped further to twenty-four thousand. And now, it is down to twenty-one thousand. The number of children dying before their fifth birthday has been cut in half and we did it in a generation using a wide range of practical strategies, from creating access to clean water to training skilled birth attendants.
Every day there are nineteen thousand fewer children dying of preventable causes – despite the fact that the total number of births is increasing. That’s remarkable progress. If we keep our current pace of progress, we will soon live in a world where massive numbers of children no longer die of preventable causes.
A third of the children who were uneducated because of poverty can now go to school. Literacy rates are climbing. Those gains were made in less than ten years.
The spread of HIV has been curbed. New HIV infections have been cut 16 per cent globally.
Until two hundred years ago, every nation on earth had an average life expectancy of about thirty years. Can you imagine if that was still true? I’d probably be dead. What if you were twenty-three years old and the odds were you only had seven years left to live. You just spent four years getting that university degree and now you’ll have seven years to use it. That was the case for all of us just a few generations ago. Except, of course, we weren’t getting university degrees. Many of us weren’t even literate – we were working in the fields and praying for good rain and no locusts. I’m not talking about the Stone Age here; this was life a few generations ago, up until about 1800.
Today many countries have a life expectancy of close to eighty years. We have more than doubled the average length of our lives. This is not only true in prosperous countries. Throughout the world (yes, including Africa) average life spans are nearly double what they were two hundred years ago. They have increased from roughly thirty years to sixty years.
The same trend is true for poverty: When we were living for only thirty years, over 90 per cent of us were also living in extreme poverty. Poverty and short length of life go together.
Today there are about 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty (2005 data – latest available). And that’s good news! In 1981, 52 per cent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Today that number is 26 per cent. If it were still at 52 per cent, then an additional two billion people would still be suffering in extreme poverty. We have already cut the percentage of people living in extreme poverty in half! And we did it in one generation.

Go here http://www.live58.org/ to find out more.