Global extreme poverty has failed to end.
And now that the pandemic has thrown ~ 100 million more people into extreme poverty, in addition to the over half a billion who were already living in extreme poverty before covid, it may simply never ever end.
What is very clear, however, is: global extreme poverty hasn’t failed to end because of the pandemic, or because there is somehow a shortage in global antipoverty funding. Nope.
This has never been a problem.
Remember, a single global antipoverty agency like the UNDP for instance, spends $5 billion annually. That figure is actually $6.6 billion in 2022. This is bigger than the GDP of several African countries, and it is the annual budget of just one global antipoverty agency.
Global poverty has failed to end because, from the beginning of time, humanity has left the world’s ultra poor (i.e., those of us who subsist directly on less than $1.9 a day in the global south), on the sidelines of the global fight against poverty.
Year after year, humanity spends billions on ending global extreme poverty, in a way that makes it nearly impossible for the extreme poor in the global south to ever see a single penny of it.
Currently, only 1% of ALL the money that is intended to end global poverty, is what goes directly to the extreme poor in the global south.
To complicate everything, the people from the global development sector, who keep the other 99% of global antipoverty funding, and who could have been the ultimate allies of the poor, are probably the hardest people humanity has ever bred.