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Surviving on pennies: we must help the world's most deprived.

Article Excerpt
Seven years ago, the international community made a commitment to halve the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger between 1990 and 2015. Now at the halfway point between its declaration and the target deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, it is obvious the world has made significant progress. However, though poverty and malnutrition rates are declining, it is less clear whether efforts are reaching the poorest and most hungry people--the world's most deprived. Currently, 1 billion people worldwide live on less than one dollar a day, the threshold defined by the international community as constituting extreme poverty. Yet, this number masks a multitude of people living in varying degrees of poverty, some even more desperately poor than others.

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In a new report, The World's Most Deprived: Characteristics and Causes of Extreme Poverty and Hunger, published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the population living on less than $1 a day is further divided into three categories, according to the depth of poverty--an analysis that better answers the question of whether the very poorest are being reached. The report is the first of its kind to use household poverty data from 1990 to 2004 to look below the dollar-a-day poverty line and examine who the poorest people are, where they live and how they have fared over time. It was conducted as part of an ongoing consultation process undertaken by IFPRI to see what policies, programmes and implementation strategies are needed for development efforts to...

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