"World Perfect InEqual: A Statistics View"

Global Poverty Facts

• Every day, poverty kills more than 50,000 innocent people - 18 million every year.
  
• These statistics account for one third of all human deaths. More people die as a result of extreme poverty than of any other cause.
• 1.37 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day, and 2.56 billion live on less than $2 a day. Moreover, 5.05 billion people (more than 80 percent of the world's population) live on less than $10 a day.
  
• Because of the global economic slowdown and rising food prices, FAO projects 100 million more people will suffer from poverty and chronic hunger by the end of 2009 - an 11% increase from 2008.
  
• Extreme poverty is increasingly concentrated in fragile states and territories, defined as those with very weak institutions and poor policies. These areas are home to 9 percent of the population living in developing countries, but nearly 27 percent of the extreme poor. These places are often sources of war, terrorism and refugee crises.
  

Hunger

• 8 million people die from lack of food and nutrition every year - about 24,000 deaths each day. 

• For the first time in history, over 1.02 billion people do not have enough to eat. That’s one sixth of humanity - more than the population of the United States, Canada and the European Union combined.
• There are around one billion hungry people in the world: 642 million live in Asia and the Pacific, 265 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 53 million in Latin America and the Caribbean, 42 in the Near East and North Africa. Fifteen million people in developed countries go hungry, around 1.5 percent of the total.
  
• The number of undernourished people in the world increased by 75 million in 2007 and 40 million in 2008, largely due to higher food prices.

Inequality

• The GDP (Gross Domestic Product, total of everyone's income) in the poorest 48 nations is less than the combined wealth of the world's three richest people.
  

• 20% of the population in developed nations consumes 86% of the world's goods.
  
• Recent studies find that prices paid by the poor in developing countries are much higher than previous thought. They cannot buy as much food with $1 as they can in a country like United States. This shows that they're even poorer than reported in  earlier studies.
  
• The poorest 40% of the world’s population accounts for 5% of the global income. The richest 20% of world’s population accounts for three-quarters of world income.
• The average yearly income of the richest 20% of people in the world is about 50 times greater than the yearly income of the poorest 20% of people.
  

Children

• Of the 2.2 billion children in the world, 600 million are victims of extreme poverty.
  
• Each year, over 10 million children in developing countries die before the age of five. More than half of these deaths are attributed to malnutrition, which claims a child's life every 5 seconds.
  
• Under nutrition contributes to 53 percent of the 9.7 million* deaths of children under five each year in developing countries. This means that one child dies every six seconds from malnutrition and related causes.
  
• Every year more than 10 million children die of hunger and preventable diseases - that’s over 30,000 per day, or one every 3 seconds.
  
• Approximately 146 million children in developing countries, about 1 out of 4, are underweight.
  
• An estimated 250 million preschool children are vitamin A deficient. An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 vitamin A-deficient children become blind every year. Half of them die within 12 months of losing their sight. This is easily corrected with an inexpensive vitamin supplement

• It is estimated that 684,000 child deaths worldwide could be prevented by increasing access to vitamin A and zinc
  

Clean Water & Sanitation

• 1.1 billion people don't have safe water and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.
  
• Dirty water and poor sanitation account for the vast majority of 1.8 million child deaths each year from diarrhea - almost 5,000 every day - making it the second largest cause of child mortality.
• Deaths from diarrhea can usually be prevented with very inexpensive oral rehydration salts.
  
• Poor sanitation and drainage contribute to malaria, which claims the lives of 1.3 million people a year, 90% of which are children under the age of five.
  

AIDS

• 39.5 million people live with HIV/AIDS, 63 percent of which live in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2006 alone, 4.3 million people became infected with HIV and 2.9 million people died of AIDS.
  
• More than 10 million children in Africa have been orphaned by AIDS.
  
• Girls and women are especially vulnerable to HIV infection and to the impact of AIDS. Globally, more than half of all people living with HIV are female.
• In Sub-Saharan Africa, women now account for 57% of HIV infections and young African women (ages 15-24) are 3 times more likely to become infected than men of comparable age in the region.
  
• Between 1990 and 2003, the average life expectancy at birth in the world increased from about 60 years to 68 years. However, the average life expectancy at birth in Sub-Saharan Africa is currently only 46 years. Life expectancy has also dropped dramatically in the countries of the former Soviet Union.

Education

• Over the last decade, the average primary completion rate (completing a full course of primary schooling) has risen from 62 percent to 72 percent.
• Still, more than 115 million children are out of school - and some 62 million of them are girls.
  
• Less than 1 percent of what the world spends each year on weapons could put every child in school.

Foreign Aid

• The USA gave $27.5 billion in foreign aid in 2005. That's only 0.22 percent of our GDP (national income), 25 cents per day per American.

• If you subtract foreign aid given for military or strategic reasons, the figure may be only $13.94 billion, about 13 cents per day per America

• The developing nations spend $25 on debt repayment for every $1 of aid they receive.