Despite enormous success in lifting 700 million people out of extreme poverty between 1990 and 2010, still one in every five persons in developing regions -- 1.22 billion people -- live on less than $1.25 a day, and 2.4 billion live on less than $2 a day.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in his message on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (Oct 17) said: “On this day we recommit to think, decide and act together against extreme poverty -- and plan for a world where no-one is left behind.
We have reached the Millennium Development Goal target of halving the proportion of people living in poverty ahead of time.”
Entrenched poverty and prejudice, and vast gulfs between wealth and destitution, can undermine the fabric of societies and lead to instability. Where poverty holds sway, people are held back. Lives disfigured by poverty are cruel, mean and, often, short. Discrimination against women and girls remains a blatant injustice, robbing the entire development enterprise of one of the keys to progress, he said.
“As we prepare the post-2015 sustainable development agenda and address the threat of climate change, we must not lose sight of our most fundamental obligation: to eliminate poverty in all its forms. We must also end the marginalization of people living in poverty,” the UN chief added, according to a press release by the UN Information Center in Tehran.
