Global poverty is by far the biggest problem in the world in both quantity and severity. It significantly affects more than 2 billion people, far more than any other problem in the world. Moreover, its impacts are severe, resulting in 30,000 people dying daily from lack of food and lack of safe water: almost all in poor areas of the world and only a little in rich countries. It also affects most aspects of people’s lives.
Despite it being the biggest problem in multiple ways, it receives less attention and resources than about 20 other problems. In fact, less than 4% of donations by Americans go to addressing it. This is true despite the fact that deaths from malnutrition and dirty water are easy and inexpensive to prevent compared to most other deaths. This illustrates the situation:
The great news is that you can make a far bigger impact in this area than you can in anything else you support. For example, it takes only $1 per year to give a person in a poor country clean water for a year, and has 3 huge impacts:
- The person doesn’t miss weeks of work from an illness from dirty water.
- The person doesn’t die.
- The average person in Africa spends 6 hours per week walking
to find and carry water to their home. $1 saves that person over 300 hours per year.
So using your donations to reduce global poverty has tremendous impacts: more bang for your buck. It also helps address a big and misguided imbalance in giving. It’s unfair and illogical for the biggest, easiest to change problem to be ignored while the smaller, hard to fix problems get most of the attention and money. The chart below illustrates the imbalance.