Poverty around the world

We live in the most developed century that has ever been. Technology is a daily part of it, which only keeps growing and revolutionizing. But does every one have access to the high-tech world we live in?

Today millions of people live without any sign of electricity. In Asia around 830, Africa about 547 and in other countries 101 does not have electricity; note that we’re talking about millions here. While these people don’t have even electric lights to light up their homes, the Western world is overflowing with extremely high technologies where every month a new hardware is coming out. Why they are not following this wave of development as some countries do? Because of a global challenge: poverty.

Poverty has been a huge problem in the whole world for centuries but the increasing rate of poor people since the last decades becomes the biggest responsibility of every little wealth country in the world before it turns into an uncontrollable problem in the coming years. Every country in the world has some sort of bad distribution of the monetary resources and faces some type of inequality.

Nevertheless the tendency is that in developed countries this difference is not so big while in under developed countries the level of inequality can be represented as a pyramid: a very small group in highly good living conditions against a huge amount of people living from poverty to misery.

Almost a billion people entered the 21^st century unable to read a book or sign their names and it’s estimated that 1.02 billion people are undernourished. Nearly 25,000 people die every day of hunger-related causes and the worst thing is that the majority of them are children. In many countries it is not possible to fulfill the basic necessities of a human being such as food, a place to live, access to hospitals, schools, job and entertainment.

Technology is the great deal of this century and can be the key used by the governments of the rich countries to contribute to establish a much better world and makes the meaning of globalization be understood as a way of uniting all the countries as part of a whole that lives and works altogether. The great challenge of spreading knowledge is the great barrier of sovereign of each country because naturally there is a fear of becoming dependent and ruled by the country that is offering help and what most happens is that the countries prefer to continue struggling to survive despite of all the hardness that comes with of this choice.

Many artists and celebrities as George Clooney, Giselle Bünchen, Ayrton Senna, Madonna and Angelina Jolie made donations for combating poverty through charity institutions; in Norway every year the schools has the “Operasjon Dagsverk” – day when the students search a job and are meant to work to earn money to help a chosen country; in some countries, there are adult programs called “Food for work”, where they get food as payment for building schools, roads, etc. what result of solving two problems at the same time: hungriness and infrastructure; there are programs for the children too, like the “Food for education”-program, when they get food if they go to school. Although these are relevant actions, there are much more to be done in order to change this sad reality.

The advances in technology have changed completely the behavior and the necessities of the human being. A family was considered to have a comfortable standard of living when it has a house furnished with a radio, TV, computer, kitchen appliances, and a yearly income capable of providing clothes, food, schools and entertainment. Nowadays, due to the world globalization and to the extremely fast development of new products, people are not satisfied anymore with this basic way of life. The desire of consumption has positively or negatively affected everybody and the family income must be much bigger than before to fulfill all the family desires. The old computer, the car, the radio, the mobile, for instance, has to be changed all the time because there is always some new model and the old one gets old fashioned. The same happens with clothes, food and even habits.

While people are trying to consume more and more, meaning they are wasting much more money to fulfill these selfish desires, no effective action are taken to extinguish or at least diminish poverty all over the world. The amount of money used to develop high-tech products, weapons of mass destruction, luxury products, to arrange the big-prized tournaments or to pay the expensive awards could be better employed in the field of infrastructure, health, education and to proportionate some kind of entertainment as parks and playgrounds.

Let’s build a better world and use our citizenship to push the government effectively to help those in need.