World Bank and Poverty Essay

Words: 3673
Pages: 15

Executive Summary
This research paper is focused on the role World Bank in Poverty Reduction, as the primary role of the World Bank is to enable development and progress in the backward countries and regions of this world. This paper explains the brief history of the World Bank, and World Bank’s five institutions. It also investigates how the World Bank is continually trying to reduce poverty by lending billions of dollars to poor countries .This paper gives some of the facts of the under-developed countries and the strategies which World Bank has incorporated to reduce the poverty in those countries.

Introduction
The World Bank was incepted with the mission of achieving a world without poverty and to provide bare minimum living

Figure 1. World distribution of percentage of people living under $1 per day
Some of the skews which greatly affect the poverty distribution in the world are influenced by the way the economic growth has happened in these regions. The GDP of the 40 most heavily indebted poor countries which account for around 567 million people is less than the wealth of the seven richest people in the world combined. The fact that nearly half of the world lives on less than two dollars a day is quite so not surprising. Almost a billion people entered the 21st century without the ability to read a book or even sign their own names. This brings out the need for literacy programs in the majority of the developing nations. The fact that around 1 billion children live in poverty which accounts for 1 out of every 2 children brings out the seriousness of the matter and how vastly and deeply poverty is embedded in the world today. Due to this poverty more than 640 million live without shelter, 400 million have shelter but no access to safe water which in turn increases their risk to succumb to diseases and around 270 million have no access to health services.Some of the primary reasons which cause such kind of poverty in this world are mainly economic differences, political influences, social processes and lack of will to do well for the needy and these combine to lead to the deprivation of adequate life support needs to the poor masses in this world[7]. Other