Poverty

Relative poverty is a term used on the news to mean people who have less money than those living around them. This term is generally used when talking, for example about "UK child poverty". (Politicians even argue about whether such differences in wealth are a good or bad thing.)
Absolute poverty is different. Some people are much poorer. For them, a whole week's income is less than the amount someone in the UK, on the legal minimum wage, earns in an hour (£5.93).

Absolute poverty means people whose income is less than 75p - £1.50 a day ($1.25 or 75p a day being "extreme poverty" according to the World Bank).

Growing up in Malawi

In this video... Dumbo Jonasi talks about his dream of becoming a manager, working in an office. But Dumbo says that school isn’t going so well for him right now...

75p a day is typically not enough money to pay for the basics (food, clean water, clothing, shelter) needed to survive in reasonable health. In some of the videos on this website you will see examples of everyday poverty; like the video on the right of a boy in Malawi who was unable to go to school because he could not pay for soap to wash his school uniform.

Poverty in Africa

Social and economic causes

An Indian economist called Amartya Sen was given the 1998 Nobel Prize for economics for his analysis of Poverty and Famine. His work pointed out that in many cases the causes of famine were not society's overall lack of food but much more social and economic.

Over the last 30 years