Poverty

Poverty is popularly understood as a state or condition of material and financial “lack” or insufficiency that negatively affects the ability of a person or group (very broadly defined) to “satisfy their basic needs” consistent with a healthy existence such as food, shelter, clothing, and health (K. Thompson 2011) and/or an inability to meet “the minimum level of living standards expected for the place where one lives” (Crossman 2019). Poverty is often stigmatized, blamed on insufficiencies in the character of the impoverished, but it is in fact evidence of the failure of governance at all levels, and it is the cause of one-third of all human deaths.