FACT: To significantly reduce the number of people living in poverty, the international community must focus on providing the poor with essential opportunities that fulfill their basic rights.

More than a billion people around the world live in dire poverty, subsisting on less than $1 a day, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The first Millennium Development Goal makes halving the number of people living in poverty by 2015 a priority, but sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and parts of Europe and Central Asia are falling short of this target. The reasons why poverty persists are many, but part of the problem may be that many people believe that it is defined by a serious scarcity of income, or what is called income poverty. Based on this idea, the solution to eliminating poverty would therefore be to increase the amount of money people earn. However, this is a rather narrow and somewhat limiting perspective. While income levels are relevant, people are poor because they are not provided the essential opportunities to fulfill their basic human rights, which include access to education, information, health care, nutritious food, and clean water, as well as the political and social power to make decisions that affect their lives, families and communities. Because such deprivations represent the denial of some basic entitlements poverty itslef can be considered as a violation of human rights.

Many people remain poor, for instance, because they lack political representation, are denied the right or ability to vote, and/or lack the empowerment to ensure that necessary resources are provided to their communities. In many developing countries, this is especially true for girls and women who often do not have an equal say in decision making within their households and/or communities, and so their desires to precipitate social change are often left unrealized. The denial of equal opportunities and the restriction of womens freedoms, whether in rich or poor countries, must be seen as a deplorable form of human deprivation, as well as a contributing cause of human poverty.

To eradicate human poverty, therefore, the global community must focus on the poverty of opportunities, not just on the poverty of incomes. Merely transferring or distributing incomes from the rich to the poor is not the solution. Governments of developing countries must work to ensure that these essential opportunitiesthose that relate to employment, health care, gender equality, and education, to name a feware available to their people. However, many individual governments cannot do this alone. They must partner with the private and public sector, including corporations and civil society organizations, as well as the international community to ensure that Goal number one is achieved.

This broader understanding of human poverty highlights the need for simultaneous interventions along multiple fronts to eradicate poverty. In other words, global poverty can be overcome only when collectively, the international community works together to pursue the attainment of every Millennium Development Goal not just a select few.