Tuesday, March 30, 2010

World Bank and poverty






The World Bank is an organization created by UN to help some poor countries in the world to develop and reconstruct. They have about 73 countries that are currently receiving help from them. The people define poverty as not having enough food to eat, not enough money, not being able to send children to school because of the school, unstable house and no close source of safe drinking water. Simple poverty is different from extreme poverty. If you live in an extreme poverty, you don't even have enough money to have the basic needs of living, such as food, water, clothing, education and health. You can't complain to the police about somebody violating your rights, they are more likely not to listen to you. You have no hope of escaping from that life unless some outer source provides you help. This is something called 'poverty trap'. Something is holding you back from getting rid of the poverty. World Bank defines poverty as barely meeting basic standards of meeting and satisfaction. There are about 1.4 billion people living in poverty. Even this is an improvement from 1.9 billion living in poverty 20 years ago. Other people need to start paying attention to the people living in poverty. If we start informing the people, the more and more people would know about their hard life and feel sympathy for them, possibly donating them money or other basic resources.
I witnessed poverty in Malaysia when i was traveling with my family in a car. We saw this Malaysian village with small and unstable looking houses. There weren't any communication antennas on the roofs. Also, there was meat hanging outside houses waiting for people to buy them. The meat was hanging in the hot sun and there were flies flying around. The people will eat them and probably get sick. It made me feel that the poverty really is a sad thing. That some of the people are living in such a bad situation.

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