What is Poverty?
Rights when she said, "I would ask, in this Human Rights Year, that we recognise fully the links between the two sets of rights. We cannot campaign for civil and political rights without ensuring the individual's economic, social and cultural rights. Those in extreme poverty are usually excluded from political processes, from access to information or to fair legal treatment and from the normal benefits of citizenship."
The definition of poverty then is moving away from a question of a lack of resources, it follows, therefore, that solutions to it should also go further. This is not to say that, because of the world we live in, money is not crucial, but it means that anti-poverty strategies need to be seen as a question of human rights rather than as acts of charity.
Poverty is not an accident, nor a natural disaster, nor inevitable, it is surely created by human beings, which means it must be soluble by us. It is finally about people not statistics.
Going back to AC Grayling's Last Word on Poverty (The Guardian 19th August 2000), he observes," The world's wealth is distributed in a grossly uneven way, not always or often reflecting true value - the MD of a City company annually earns more than 50 nurses , which is a strange fact. 'The rich cannot eat money,' a Russian proverb dryly observes, 'so it's just as well that there are poor folk to grow their food.'"
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