NEW YORK – According to a United Nations (UN) report, 165 million people worldwide have fallen below the poverty line in recent years, reported German news agency (dpa).
Due to the COVID pandemic and economic upheavals since 2020, the daily money available to those affected has fallen below the threshold of US$3.65, the UN development agency United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) announced on Friday.
“That number could in fact have been even higher, had governments not during COVID-19 stepped up with social safety programmes and stimulus packages,” said UNDP head Achim Steiner, the highest-ranking German representative at the UN.
“Particularly for low-income countries at this moment in time, that burden has become unsustainable. A government that can no longer employ doctors and nurses in hospitals, that cannot provide medicines for rural health centres, is essentially eroding the social infrastructure of the country,” Steiner said.
“And this is what it translates into less healthcare, less education, no social safety nets that are able to provide temporary relief for people who through no fault of their own find themselves in a situation where they literally cannot feed their family anymore, he added.
The UN warned on Wednesday that 52 countries in the world were sitting in a debt trap that they could never manage to escape without help. In 2022, the world’s public debt would have risen to a record US$92 trillion, five times as much as in 2000.
A good 40 per cent of the world’s population – 3.3 billion people – live in countries where interest payments on loans exceed expenditure on health or education, the UN said.- Bernama
