Summary (English)

In the publication Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015, UNICEF stresses the importance of tracking global poverty and describes some changes in the composition of global poverty with a prognostic about where poverty will be concentrated in the future.

UNICEF forecasts that many households have successfully broken out of the extreme poverty trap. To maintain this success, however, large scale, long-term and sustainable programs, which provide for children’s basic needs in education, health, nutrition and social protection are required.

Cash transfer programs have shown to be effective tools for this purpose. UNICEF’s results indicate that providing every person in the world with a minimum income of $1.25/day – in other words guaranteeing the right not to live in absolute poverty – is rapidly becoming feasible. The cost of supplementing the income of a poor person to reach the minimum of USD1.25 a day would have cost USD96 billion; while in 2010, the cost would be USD66 billion. Moreover, conditional transfers which encourage families to keep children in school and ensure they receive regular medical care can compound the development impact of a global safety net. While the logistics of distributing cash to poor populations would not be without challenges, recent advances in biometric identification technologies – such as fingerprint and iris scanning – have greatly expanded the promise of implementing large-scale social welfare programs in poor countries.