The persistence of poverty is a moral indictment of our times. While there are some signs of progress, the fact remains: never have we seen so much wealth while so many continue to live in abject poverty.
Poverty is a complex, deep-seated, pervasive reality. Virtually half the world lives on less than US$2 a day. More than 1 billion people struggle on $1 a day or less. And an even greater challenge lies beyond what statistics can measure – poverty breeds a growing sense of powerlessness and indignity, of being unable to think, plan or dream beyond the daily struggle to survive.
For individuals, poverty is a nightmare. It is a vicious circle of poor health, reduced working capacity, low productivity and shortened life expectancy.
For families, poverty is a trap. It leads to inadequate schooling, low skills, insecure income, early parenthood, ill health and an early death. For societies, poverty is a curse. It hinders growth, fuels instability, and keeps poor countries from advancing on the path to sustainable development. For all of us – and for all these reasons – the cost of poverty in shattered human lives is far too high.
But there is another face to poverty. People living in conditions of material deprivation draw on enormous reserves of courage, ingenuity, persistence and mutual support to keep on the treadmill of survival. After all, for most people living in poverty, there is no safety net and little state support. Simply coping with poverty demonstrates the resilience and creativity of the human spirit. In many ways, the working poor are the ultimate entrepreneurs.
People in poverty go through each day with the will to survive, but without the support and possibilities to move up the ladder of opportunity.
Imagine where their efforts could take them if that ladder were in place. Our common responsibility is to help put it there.
After all, the poor do not cause poverty. Poverty is the result of structural failures and ineffective economic and social systems. It is the product of inadequate political responses, bankrupt policy imagination and insufficient international support. Its continued acceptance expresses a loss of fundamental human values.
To be sure, poverty is a global phenomenon that occurs in every society.
No nation is immune. In 20 industrialized countries, for example, over 10 per cent of the population, on average, was living below the poverty line in the mid-1990s. Wealthier nations are working to take on the poverty fight at home, but the global community has agreed to come together to confront the most extreme forms of poverty in the developing world – and I would add the similar forms of poverty emerging in a number of transition countries.
This Report is focused on that challenge.
Specifically, this Report is about how the ILO and its constituents can better respond to the aspirations and everyday needs of people living in poverty. It is about the direct link between decent work as a development agenda and poverty eradication. It is about the fundamental importance of equality – and in particular gender equality – to decent work and defeating poverty. It is about teaming up with other international organizations to implement the poverty eradication and other commitments of the World Summit for Social Development (the “Social Summit”) and the Millennium Declaration. It is about concrete ways of targeting the poverty-fighting impact of ILO policy proposals and technical cooperation programmes.
In short, it is about working out of poverty.
To learn more about this author, visit International Labour Organization's Website.
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