Child Poverty Research Paper

In Ghana, eight-year-old Fati lives in pain with the malaria she contracted roughly one year ago. Nevertheless, every day Fati navigates an electronic waste dumpsite to search for tradable metal. And she is not alone. Numerous impoverished boys and girls, teens and pre-teens, pass their days inhaling the toxic air from burning metals, while carbon soot and more toxins are absorbed into or cling onto their skin (Nazario 228 - 234). These children have one similarity: they are each penurious. Sadly, these children are not the only humans in the world suffering from being needy. Worldwide, approximately one billion, or one in two, children live in poverty (Shah). Approximately 1.2 billion humans live on less than one dollar every day (Poverty

In fact, a multitude of forms of poverty exists. To begin, poverty is compared to the average quality of life in a given country (Poverty: What Is It?, 1; Poverty UNESCO). This means if one does not have access to electricity or water, does not have a permanent dwelling, and is unable to lead an average life such as a middle-class person in a developed country, one lives in relative poverty. A second form of poverty is income poverty. According to UNESCO, if one’s income does not reach the federal income line of one’s country, one lives in income poverty. Take a family of five or six, for example. If that family has only one source of income, that family would likely live in income poverty especially if the income was low or unstable. In addition to relative and income poverty, there is extreme poverty, also referred to as absolute poverty. Extreme poverty is when one lives on less than one dollar each day (Poverty and Health). With such severe poverty, many people do not have access to the tools which are essential to life: food, water, and shelter (Poverty: What Is It?, 1). Many, too, do not have the means for proper sanitation. Though poverty in any form is capable of being fatal, perhaps the foulest of them all is systematic poverty – poverty which will not regress (Bishop, T.). Unrelenting poverty can be deadly as it keeps people in poverty for years or decades, sometimes from birth to grave. Though several people may believe poverty is a minor problem as it does not plague their daily lives, one in three from over seven billion humans live in some form of poverty (Who We Are; Country Meters). The world’s first priority is to query into why this injustice has not been