By Xavier Godinot, International Movement ATD Fourth World
In the UN General Assembly resolution adopting the 2030 Agenda on 25 September 2015, SDG 1 reads: “End poverty in all its forms everywhere”, with target 1.1 stating: “By 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than US$ 1.25 a day.” Yet, in early October 2015, the World Bank stated that the international extreme poverty line needed to be updated in order to take [...]
By Roberto Bissio, Social Watch
With contradictory arguments, the World Bank defines a very low threshold that would make poverty eradication possible with relatively little effort and at the same time argues that it is necessary to “move from millions to trillions”. Accordingly, it has taken a “cascade approach” to investment decision-making to encourage partnerships with the private sector. The winners are the big financial intermediaries, who leverage these partnerships, while the poor might end up paying additional fees for [...]
By Xavier Godinot, International Movement ATD Fourth World
For some development agency staff, involving people living in poverty in development programmes appears to be too difficult, time-consuming and costly. Some have developed forms of ‘willful blindness’ over the exclusion of the poorest people in the projects they finance, classified as such and analyzed by Jean-Michel Séverino, former Vice-President of the World Bank and former Chief Executive Officer of Agence Française de Developpement. Refusing to see this exclusion as problematic makes [...]
By Roberto Bissio, Social Watch
The first goal in the new sustainable development agenda is very ambitious and sets a high standard for the international community: End poverty in all its forms everywhere.
Ending poverty is an aspiration that is implicit in the 1945 United Nations charter that includes in its preamble the determination “to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1947) established “freedom from fear and want” as [...]
With support from
