Poverty

BY: SHAYLA SAMUEL, COURTNEY MADDOX

What is poverty?

• Poverty is general scarcity or a situation where someone lacks certain amount of material possessions or money. There are different types of poverty: Absolute poverty, Relative poverty and Situational poverty.

Absolute Poverty

This is an extreme kind of poverty involving the chronic lack of basic food, clean water, health and housing. People in absolute poverty tend to struggle to live and experience lots of child deaths from preventable diseases like Malaria, Cholera and water contamination. This type of poverty is usually long term in nature and handed to them by generations before. You wont see this kind of poverty in the developed world.

Relative Poverty

Relative poverty is when people lack the minimum amount of income needed to live. Relative poverty is considered the easiest way to measure the level of poverty in a country. There are a lot of causes for relative poverty: Unemployment, Education, Poor health and lack of access to affordable services. This type of poverty can change over time. Whenever the wealth of a society increases, so does the amount of income and recourses necessary for proper living conditions.

Situational Poverty

Situational poverty is when a person is extremely poor because of external circumstances. This is usually only a temporary situation. There are many causes for situational poverty. One being if you happened to lose your job and end up not having the proper income to live, if the person who provided for your family dies or a natural disaster such as an earthquake hits your home then everything you’ve worked for is gone.