17 October: International Day for Eradication of Poverty

International Day for the Eradication of Poverty is observed every year on 17 October to raise awareness about the struggles of people living in poverty.
The theme for this year’s observation is “Building Forward Together: Ending Persistent Poverty, Respecting all People & our Planet”.
Building forward implies that not only is it ensured that no one is left behind but encouraging people to be an active participant in the decision-making process. Building forward means that all those structures of discrimination that pushes people off the edge are dismantled, relationship with nature is redefined a such is a system is built which gives importance to those moral and legal framework which ensure human dignity.

(Image Source: UN)

The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to have pushed between 143 and 163 million people into poverty in 2021.
The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to have increased poverty by 8.1% in 2020 relative to 2019 (from 8.4% to 9.1%).
The number of people living under the international poverty lines for lower and upper middle-income countries is projected to have increased in the poverty rate of 2.3 percentage points.
Almost half of the projected new poor will be in South Asia, and more than a third in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In the Middle East and North Africa, extreme poverty rates nearly doubled between 2015 and 2018, from 3.8 percent to 7.2 percent, spurred by the conflicts in the Syrian Arab Republic and the Republic of Yemen.
Current projections indicate that shared prosperity will have dropped sharply in nearly all economies in 2020–21, as the pandemic’s economic burden is felt across the entire income distribution.