Extreme Global Poverty

From The Life You Can Save's Website:

UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that anywhere between 10-20,000 children under the age of 5 die each day from preventable causes associated with extreme poverty. This is over 600 children an hour or 10 per minute. These causes of death include insufficient nutrition, lack of access to clean water, inadequate health care services, malaria, dysentery, and neonatal infection. These are diseases and health problems that are essentially non-existent in the developed world thanks to countless advances. And yet despite these improvements, several billion people continue to live and die in poverty, struggling daily with its dire effects.

Extreme poverty has many causes: harsh climate, lack of fertile land, war and political strife, government corruption, unfair trade policies, disease, and famine. Many of these causes are in turn exacerbated by poverty, contributing to a cycle of suffering that prevents the world’s neediest people from accessing the basic health services, resources, and information that they need to survive.