Extreme Poverty

Extreme poverty is one of two distinct forms of poverty, the other being relative poverty. Whereas relative poverty refers to those who are in poverty based on a comparison to others in society, extreme poverty measures poverty on an absolute scale, and it refers to those who do not have the means to meet their most basic needs of survival. This is commonly seen as those who have less than $1.25 a day to live on (once adjusted for purchasing power parity), and most recent data in 2012 has levels of extreme poverty at around 1.2 billion people globally, with the majority of these people in India, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The Millennium Development Goals, set in 2000 by the 189 member countries of ...