On Savings and Poverty

philip,

you use money either way, now or in the future. you use it now for basic needs or for instant gratification and save some for future needs or for delayed gratification.

your example of one who cannot feed his family is a worst scenario which jen is trying to address. we see them all around us, people who do not even have decent jobs marrying and having children. i believe this has got to do with the "bahala na" attitude of some of us.

i don't want to sound very technical but as we have the rich, the middle income and the poor categories, there are also categories of poverty and those who want to do interventions (those who are into poverty alleviation/reduction programs) should know which category they are addressing to.

for example, micro-finance are for the entrepreneurial poor. grants/aids/donations are for the chronic poor.

for more information, one may access the world bank's povertynet website: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTPOVERTY/
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336992,00.html

to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger is one of the eight millenium development goals (mdg) (http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/index.html). The poverty goal calls for reducing by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day by 2015. A reduction from 28 percent in 1990 to 12.7 percent in 2015, would reduce the number of extreme poor by 363 million.

tony

(posted at pwedenabook egroup)