Around 375 million children worldwide — including nearly one-in-six children in the U.S. — live in crushing poverty, says a new report coinciding with the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, Oct. 17.
The staggering global number — equal to the entire populations of the U.S. and Canada combined — is revealed in a special report by leading mission agency Gospel for Asia (GFA World, www.gfa.org), as the U.N. marks its annual awareness day, aimed at stirring action to fight poverty.
The report — Fighting Global Poverty With Ideas — says education and ideas, along with teaching values such as compassion and integrity, can help catapult the next generation out of the jaws of poverty.
“The ability to eradicate extreme poverty is here,” said Texas-based GFA World founder Dr. K.P. Yohannan. “Ideas and values together can transform the world.”
Grinding poverty is most often associated with developing nations in Africa and Asia, but it’s a scourge in wealthy, developed countries, too.
According to PovertyUSA.org — a Catholic initiative — nearly one-in-six children in the U.S. lives in poverty. The federal poverty threshold for a family of four is around $25,700 a year.
And, the group says, one in every four Americans with a disability lives in poverty.
Globally, millions of widows — and millions more living with the disease leprosy — are shunned by their families and neighbors, plunged into extreme poverty and struggling to survive as outcasts in their own communities. They’re seen as cursed, and excluded from the mainstream of life and business.
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SOURCE: Assist News Service
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