What in the world is going on? Pip Florit highlights global issues that haven’t been hitting our headlines recently.
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t has been a rare occurrence in the past year to turn on the news and be met with a headline that has nothing to do with Covid-19. Sometimes it’s a struggle to remember what filled our news before the pandemic. At times, it has felt like other global issues have gone away, but that is far from the case. While we have been wrestling with huge concerns about health and the economy, many low-income countries have been struggling with the same issues, superimposed on a background of vulnerability caused by poverty, violence, displacement and climate disasters.
Poverty For the past 20 years, the global poverty trend has been heading in the right direction. Each year, fewer and fewer people have been living in extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 per day. When the United Nations produced the Sustainable Development
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Herald Spring 2021
Goals in 2015, goal number one was to “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” by 2030. It was always known to be ambitious and now, Covid-19 has created a setback. By the end of 2020, there was an annual increase in the number of people living in extreme poverty for the first time since 1998 with around 100 million people being pushed into that group and millions more predicted to join it in 2021.
…there was an annual increase in the number of people living in extreme poverty for the first time since 1998 with around 100 million people being pushed into that group…
Many low-income countries have experienced fewer cases of Covid-19 than European countries. As of the end of January, Malawi had reported around 20,000 cases (0.1% of the population), Myanmar 138,000 (0.26% population) and Zambia 45,000 (0.25% population). This is compared to 3.65 million cases in the UK (5.5% of the population). However, the socioeconomic impact has often been devastating. Nearly 10 million people in the UK have been on the government furlough scheme at some stage since March 2020. For many businesses and individuals, it has been a lifeline. But what happens when the government enforces a strict lockdown without the capacity to support those for whom that means a loss of income? In countries where informal labour is so prevalent, where working from home isn’t an option and few people have significant savings, the resulting loss of income has been catastrophic for some.
