ABSTRACT
Poverty has existed throughout history. However, only in recent decades has it become a central policy concern in the global arena. In 1990, the World Bank made poverty reduction the theme for its World Development Report of that year. The World Bank has even made its mission ‘Working for a World Free of Poverty’. More significantly, in September 2000, at the 55th Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, heads of state and government adopted the Millennium Declaration and committed their nations to a global partnership to eradicate extreme poverty and to meet a series of time-bound targets – later known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The first of the 18 targets is to ‘halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than $1 a day’ (United Nations 2014, p. 8). This initiative has made poverty reduction a universal development challenge.
