Did you know…in Canada…

• one in five households spend over 50 percent of their income on rent, which puts them at risk of homelessness?
• 42 percent of Canadians say they would be in financial difficulty if their pay was delayed one week?
• one in 10 Canadians can’t afford to fill their medical prescriptions?
• as of 2015, there is no national plan to reduce poverty?
• as many as 1.3 million Canadians have experienced homelessness over the last five years?
• one in eight Canadian households struggle to put food on the table?
• child poverty in Canada is three to five times higher than countries that make it a priority to eliminate it?
• one in seven Canadian children live in poverty?
• minimum-wage increases do not reduce poverty. Most workers who benefit from a minimum wage hike are not members of a poor household?
• 200,000 people are homeless in a year, costing the Canadian economy $7 billion annually?

-Source: The Salvation Army.

Did you know…in Africa…

1. Seventy-five percent of the world’s poorest countries are located in Africa, including Zimbabwe, Liberia, and Ethiopia. The Central African Republic ranked the poorest in the world with a GDP per capita of $656 in 2016.
2. According to Gallup World, in 2013, the 10 countries with the highest proportion of residents living in extreme poverty were all in sub-Saharan Africa. Extreme poverty is defined as living on $1.25 or less a day. In 2010, 414 million people were living in extreme poverty across sub-Saharan Africa. According to the World Bank, those living on $1.25 a day accounted for 48.5 percent of the population in that region in 2010.
3. Approximately one in three people living in sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations estimated that 239 million people (around 30 percent of the population) in sub-Saharan Africa were hungry in 2010. This is the highest percentage of any region in the world. In addition, the U.N. Millennium Project reported that over 40 percent of all Africans are unable to regularly obtain sufficient food.
4. In sub-Saharan Africa, 589 million people live without electricity. As a result, a staggering 80 percent of the population relies on biomass products such as wood, charcoal, and dung in order to cook.
5. Of the 738 million people globally who lack access to clean water, 37 percent are living in sub-Saharan Africa. Poverty in Africa results in more than 500 million people suffering from waterborne diseases. According to the U.N. Millennium Project, more than 50 percent of Africans have a water-related illness like cholera.
6. Every year, sub-Saharan Africa misses out on about $30 billion as productivity is compromised by water and sanitation problems. This amount accounts for approximately five percent of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP), exceeding the total amount of foreign aid sent to sub-Saharan Africa in 2003.
7. Due to continuing violence, conflict, and widespread human rights abuses, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that 18 million people are of concern to the agency, including stateless people and returnees.
8. Fewer than 20 percent of African women have access to education. Uneducated African women are twice as likely to contract AIDS and 50 percent less likely to immunize their children. Meanwhile, the children of African women with at least five years of schooling have a 40 percent higher chance of survival.
9. Women in sub-Saharan Africa are more than 230 times more likely to die during childbirth or pregnancy than women in North America. Approximately one in 16 women living in sub-Saharan African will die during childbirth or pregnancy; only one in 4,000 women in North America will.
10. More than one million people, mostly children under the age of five, die every year from malaria. Malaria deaths in Africa alone account for 90 percent of all malaria deaths worldwide. Eighty percent of these victims are African children. The U.N. Millennium Project has calculated that a child in Africa dies from malaria every 30 seconds, or about 3,000 each day.

– Jordanna Packtor

Sources: Global Issues, World Hunger, World Bank, World Population Review, The Richest, Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute, UNHCR, The Water Project, Gallup, Global Finance