Week2

 

Poverty in the 21st century

Photo pasted from THE 17 GOALS | Sustainable Development (un.org) 

No poverty is one of the goals that we must achive. 

Poverty has always been a major issue in the society throughout the history. Having 1929 great depression at the head of the list, there have been a lot of historical events (such as Lehman shock in 2008) that eventually led people to suffer from financial crisis. Recently however, constant poverty is becoming a commonplace even in developed countries including Japan. With COVID-19 pandemic, poverty rate in Japan is worse than ever. It is said that more than 4 years of progress in fights of poverty had been erased by COVID-19. For your information, it has been almost ３years since the pandemic hit. In fact, the number of people who live in extreme poverty has risin to 676 million. To think about the fact that this number in pre-pandemic was 581 million, COVID-19 has affected peoples´life significantly. Moreover, in Africa where　poverty is seen as a big problem in particular, new problems such as shortages of hospital to get people vaccinated has occured, futher exacerbating the situation.  

As I mentioned earlier, relative poverty is a huge problem in Japan.

(the word poverty you would probably relate to is called absolute poverty)

Despite the fact that Japanese government trying to save those who are experiencing hard moment in terms of money, the situation has not been fixed yet. It is obvious that more fundamental support is needed. In this blog, I am going to do some resarch in detail and from a lot of viewpoints. 

What kind of problems has poverty caused in the world and in Japan?