When people lack means to satisfy basic needs

The most common question when hearing the word poverty is what is meant by it or what does poverty means? Poverty means a state or condition in which a person lacks financial resources and essentials for a minimum standard of living.

Poverty is said to exist when people lack the means to satisfy their basic needs. Poverty may include social, economic and political elements. The second question that comes in mind after reading the word poverty is what is the cause of poverty? The answer is, there is no single cause of poverty. Rather, there are multiple causes that are linked and compounding. Poverty can strike during unexpected crises: a serious health problem, job loss, or divorce. These crises can be particularly debilitating when compounded by other risk factors such as low education, limited skills, lack of family supports. Women are generally at higher risk of poverty than men as they are less likely to be in paid employment, tend to have lower pensions, and are more involved in unpaid caring responsibilities and when they are at work, are frequently paid less even for the same job. Poverty is also common in disable people. Poverty comes in different forms. There are basic 6 types of poverties. Number one situational: this type of poverty is usually temporary as it involves crises or loss. Events causing this type of poverty are divorce, health problems, or environmental disasters. The second type of poverty is generational poverty. This type of poverty usually involves families in which two generations have been born in poverty.

The third type of poverty is called absolute poverty. This type of poverty only occurs in poor countries. This poverty involves a scarcity of daily necessities such as shelter, food, clean water, education, and other daily needs. People who live in areas with absolute poverty tend to focus on daily survival. They only do work to meet their daily needs.

The fourth type of poverty includes relative poverty. This type of poverty refers to the economic status of the family. In this poverty a whole family’s income is insufficient to meet their daily needs. The fifth type of poverty is called urban poverty. This type of poverty occurs in places with population of 50,000 people. This poverty takes place because of poor urban governance. This may include crowding, violence and noise. The sixth type of poverty is called rural poverty. This type of poverty occurs in a place or city with population less 50,000.

The reason for this type of poverty is their poor service and less education. In rural areas, there are single guardian household, and families often have less access to services. Poverty might come in many other forms but these six factors are the main reasons for poverty. Talking about states and countries affected by poverty are few in number. Our country Pakistan is also affected by poverty or you can say that has a long history of poverty. Poverty in Pakistan is pretty common because of our poor governance and continuous political issues. Our country is under-developed. It has many stumbling factors and the main reason of our country’s downfall is our political issues that date back to our independence in 1947.

Since our independence, we have given our top priority to our political system, hence we neglected what was important at that time. We choose our political leaders that didn’t have any ideas of the modern world. Due to our bad governance and poor politic system, our country is facing major problems. We did not take any serious measures to prevent poverty. We did not make any policies to make our economic system better for our upcoming generations.

The second main reason for poverty in our country is illiteracy. In Pakistan, education sectors are not playing any major role. In our country, few people can get education and many people from villages and rural areas are not getting the facility to get proper education. In our country, there is also gender difference in education. Males get more education than females. Males are allowed to get more education and females get specific education.

The percentage of male and female literacy rate is also very different. The percentage of literate males in our country is 72.5% whereas the percentage of literate female is 51.8%. This shows the difference between two genders in terms of education. The reason why education is the reason for poverty is because if we don’t know about basic words of English and basic theories of addition and subtraction, how will we able to work and earn money.

Another reason for poverty in our country is corruption. Corruption includes wrong ways to get money by using fair and unfair means. Pakistan has great history of corruption. Every political leader that was chosen to make the country better has been involved in corruption. Our political leaders only worked for their selves to make more money so they can live a lavish life. On the other hand because of their greed to earn more money, they totally forgot about the lives of people which became the reason for poverty in our country. Another reason for poverty in Pakistan is bad governance. Our political leaders did not take any serious measures to make any serious laws to help people with poor state. Bad governance is the main reason for bad relation between people and the government. To solve the issue of poverty from our country, we need to make our governance system better so that every person in our country can get a chance to prove his or herself.

To sum up, I want to say that if we want to make our country shine and to make our country progress, we need to take possible measures to stop poverty and make our economic system better. We need to take possible measures to spread awareness to eliminate poverty. Even though poverty is a very vast issue, there is still hope that in the near future, we as a nation can take every possible measure to stop poverty from spreading more and more in every single province. Make education free for all and give males and females equal type of education so that they both can be independent in their own ways. As Lyndon B Johnson said: “Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.”—Misbah Banaras (The writer is a student of BS Psychology at Ripah International University)