Is it possible to end poverty?

After decades of progress in the fight against extreme poverty, experts are now warning the United Nations will miss its goal of ending poverty by 2030. Tim Wyatt speaks to practitioners and theologians to find out what’s going wrong, and what Jesus meant when he said, “the poor you will always have with you.” 

In 2015 the great and the good gathered at a UN summit to agree a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Number one of these was simple: “End poverty in all its forms everywhere”.

More specifically, the UN set a target: by 2030 nobody should be living on less than $1.25 a day, the global benchmark for extreme poverty.

This may sound impossibly ambitious, but in fact most of the work had already been done. In 1820, as the Industrial Revolution was getting going, three quarters of the world lived below an equivalent poverty line. By the early 1990s this had dwindled to about 35 per cent of the population. And the rate of decline then sped up significantly – by 2015 when the SDGs were agreed, just 11 per cent of people were surviving on $1.25 a day or less.