“Poverty First” on the Africa Eats blog explains why poverty needs to be addressed before other important impacts. The end of that post includes a link to Dollar Street, a great project on the Gapminder website, created by the late Hans Rosling of TED talk fame and Factfulness book.
On Dollar Street you can see pictures and videos of families living on $1/day, $2/day, $3/day and onward. You can see what a house, bed, toilet, most loved toy, and more look like for real families. And you can see how doubling income at these level of poverty make a huge difference in the quality of life.
40% of Africans live on less than $3/day. Note that is the family income of $3/day, not $3 per family member. $3/day means $90 per month to house and feed a family of 6 or 7 or 8. For quite a lot of families, they’d need to double their monthly income to live that well.
I’ve seen what this looks like while traveling around Africa. It’s even more heartbreaking in person, which is why I spend most of my time on Africa Eats, working to make this site a museum of history, eliminating this level of poverty from the continent.
