Enterprise Excellence 3

Telling Statistics

The UK government's Department for International Development (DFID) produces fact sheets that focus on each of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Whatever the deficiencies of the MDGs (we note William Easterly's criticism of the MDGs under the 'Resources' section of Enterprise Excellence 3), they do provide a means by which awareness of poverty and its alleviation can be spread more widely.

The first of the MDGs is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. The target associated with it is to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day.

DFID wish to communicate the following key messages about this goal:

• Extreme poverty is defined as having to live on less than $1 a day. If the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day was halved, it would reduce the number of people living in extreme poverty from £1.2 billion in 1990 to 890 million in 2015.
• Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty is falling, but there are large variations in progress between regions. Asia is making good progress, but there is little movement elsewhere and sub-Saharan Africa is going backwards.
• Economic growth is a necessary condition for poverty reduction. The countries that have seen the greatest progress in income poverty reduction have been those with the strongest growth rates.
• Growth is not just essential for reducing income poverty, but also for reaching the other Millennium Development Goal targets. Growth enables governments to fund more basic social services, it affects the extent of economic discrimination against women and also the extent to which poor people are either exploited or empowered in the economic, social and political arenas.

DFID also provide the following key facts and figures to accompany these messages:

• In 1990, 28% of the developing country population lived in extreme poverty. By 2000, it had fallen to 22%
• East Asia has already cut its poverty rate in half and South Asia is making good progress
• In sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion in extreme poverty has risen slightly from 47% in 1990 to 49% in 2000
• In sub-Saharan Africa, the average per capita growth rate over the 1990s was - 0.2%. In East Asia, it was 6.4%

Provided economic growth remains on track, DFID is confident that 12.5% of the world's population will be in poverty in 2015 and that this will mean that the target is achieved.

For DFID's view on the obstacles to improvement and what it is doing, alongside international institutions, to remove them, click here. This link also provides case studies of DFID-funded initiatives designed to tackle poverty in Southern Africa.