International Day for the Eradication of Poverty : It's time to act.

Did you know that this Monday, October 17th, is the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty? On this date in 1987, more than 100,000 people gathered in Paris, France, in a demonstration to protest against poverty and to highlight the situation of its victims as a violation of human rights. Five years later, a General Assembly of the United Nations, through a resolution, also established this date to defend the cause.

According to the UN , poverty involves not only the lack of resources and income to ensure sustainable livelihoods. It also includes hunger, malnutrition, limited access to education and other basic services, discrimination, social exclusion, and lack of participation in decision-making.

Eradicating poverty is the number one goal of the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development's global action plan. The aim is to eliminate extreme poverty everywhere by that year. However, the World Bank has found that progress towards this has stalled and that it is unlikely the planet will be able to achieve this goal if the situation does not change in the coming years.

A new report has provided updated figures on the situation, and the new global extreme poverty line has been adjusted to US$2.15 per day (instead of the US$1.90 previously used by the UN), a change adopted to reflect the latest purchasing power parity data from 2017. The poverty line in upper-middle-income countries, such as Brazil, has been set at US$6.85 per day, instead of US$5.50.

According to the institution's report, the pandemic pushed approximately 70 million people into extreme poverty in 2020, the largest single-year increase since monitoring began in 1990. Another alarming estimate is that around 600 million people will struggle to live on less than US$2.15 a day by 2030.

In Brazil, studies also show that the problem is enormous and that action is needed now to reverse the situation. The " Map of the New Poverty" for 2021, by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation, recorded the highest number of poor people in the country since the beginning of the historical series in 2012.

The research indicated that 62.9 million Brazilians – about 29.6% of the population – lived with a per capita household income of up to R$ 497 per month, an amount that corresponded to the international poverty line of US$ 5.50 per day. To draw a comparison between the years 2019 and 2021, there was an increase of 9.6 million people living in poverty.

It is truly very difficult to imagine how it is possible to live in such unfavorable conditions in a country like Brazil. The Legado event , organized by the Bem Maior Movement and Santander bank in April, revealed, for example, that 55% of Brazilians lived with some type of food insecurity and that 73% of homes did not have treated sewage.

All these figures show that the country and the planet need philanthropy to overcome these immense challenges. Civil society, businesses, and governments must unite in the fight to eradicate poverty. As the UN itself says, it is necessary to "ensure significant mobilization of resources from a variety of sources, including through strengthened development cooperation" so that countries "implement programs and policies to end poverty in all its dimensions.".

Philanthropy plays a fundamental role in discovering innovative solutions that can be adapted by the public sector to multiply their impact. There is no shortage of examples of sensational initiatives to support this cause.

Gerando Falcões , which work to transform favelas into dignified, digital, and developed environments, were implemented in all cities of Brazil IPTI (Institute for Research in Technology and Innovation), which seeks innovations to promote human development with social technologies, were replicated? And what if people were inspired by the actions of the Instituto Madeira da Terra , which generate income for women in the northeastern hinterland and preserve the diversity of fauna and flora? It would certainly be a revolution in the communities.

Now is the time for unity to turn this situation around, so that the eradication of poverty is not just an objective of a UN plan, but a real goal for everyone.