What is poor?

What is "poor"? As you have seen, Barnardo's view being poor as more than just having very little money. If you are looking for a definition in terms of money, the World Bank (www.worldbank.org) defines "extreme poverty" as having less than US$1 a day to live on (that's 75 pence) to cover everything: food, housing, clothing, everything. Very few people in the UK are as poor as that. To find out about the International Development Goals for reducing poverty, visit http://www.developmentgoals.org/Poverty.htm.

Another organisation decided to look at what people thought were the "essentials" of life. The organisation asked a number of people to list, in order of priority, all the things people had to have in order to play a part in society. Then they took the list of the things people mentioned most often, and found out how many people did not have these essentials.

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