“Building Forward Together: Ending Persistent Poverty, Respecting all People and our Planet”
The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty is observed each year on October 17 throughout the world.
The day was first commemorated on this day in 1987 at an event that took place on the Human Rights and Liberties Plaza at the Trocadéroin Paris, France.
On this day, Father Joseph Wresinski with 100,000 people came together to honor victims of poverty, hunger, violence and fear.
Father Joseph Wresinski, is the founder of the International Movement ATD Fourth World.
In 1992, four years after Wresinski’s death, the United Nations officially designated October 17 as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.
According to the United nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs world needs to overcome the following statistics;
• The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to have pushed between 143 and 163 million people into poverty in 2021.
• The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have increased poverty by 8.1% in 2020 relative to 2019.
• The number of people living under the international poverty lines for lower and upper middle-income countries is projected to have increased in the poverty rate of 2.3 percentage points.
• Almost half of the projected new poor will be in South Asia, and more than a third in Sub-Saharan Africa.
• In the Middle East and North Africa, extreme poverty rates nearly doubled between 2015 and 2018, from 3.8 percent to 7.2 percent, spurred by the conflicts in the Syrian Arab Republic and the Republic of Yemen.
• COVID-19 has already been the worst reversal on the path towards the goal of global poverty reduction in last three decades.
We live in unprecedented times, according to Forbs The world’s total net wealth has hit $431 trillion, nearly half a quadrillion dollars, and over a quarter of it is controlled by millionaires. With 3% 13.1 trillion owned by 2755 people (The total number of billionaires in the world).
According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, the world’s richest 1 percent, those with more than $1 million, own 43.4 percent of the world’s wealth.
The report also shows that adults with less than $10,000 in wealth make up 53.6 percent of the world’s population but hold just 1.4 percent of global wealth.
As a people we are the smartest and richest as we have ever been in history but what has grown is the wealth inequality gap.
