What is the state of Child Poverty in Zimbabwe? 

Photo credit: RuriByaku Children (0 –17 years old) are more at risk of becoming poor than adults (as reported here and here). Accordingly, they make up a large proportion of poor people globally. In 2022, for example, 50% of the 1.2 billion multidimensionally poor people from 111 countries were children. This makes child poverty a …

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Can access to clean cooking contribute to poverty eradication?

Lack of access to clean cooking (cleaner fuels and efficient cookstoves) is one of humanity's greatest challenges today. The World Bank reports that 4 billion people worldwide have no access to clean cooking services. This situation is particularly dire in rural areas, where most households use unclean fuels and inefficient cookstoves. In Zimbabwe and Malawi, …

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Energy poverty: an underperceived albeit a critical form of poverty!

Source: https://www.socialistsanddemocrats.eu/endenergypoverty In her most enlightening book, How Boards Work, Dambisa Moyo calls for corporate companies to, with the influence and guidance of their boards, constructively and methodically act to address societal and environmental concerns such as gender inequality, poverty and emissions of greenhouse gases. I found this both encouraging and refreshing. It made me …

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Are you passionate about changing rural lives? Consider doing a BSc Honours Degree in Rural Development at Great Zimbabwe University!

In 2021, I had the opportunity to lead the designing of a BSc Honours Degree in Rural Development, which the Zimbabwe Council for Higher Education recently approved and is now on offer at Great Zimbabwe University (GZU), the University of Choice! Now that the 2022 Advanced level results are out, I would like to share …

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The problem with the $2.15 (formerly $1.90)-a-day international definition of extreme poverty

On the 24th of December 2022, I watched, for the second time, the living on a dollar a day documentary, which provides invaluable insights into what it means to live on less than a dollar day, which how extreme poverty was defined during the Millennium Development Goals era. Today, the World Bank defines extreme poverty …

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What is the state of poverty in the world?

Poverty, as shared in our article here, is one of the defining challenges of our time. Governments, NGOs and other actors are committed to eliminating poverty, and they take stock of their poverty eradication efforts annually on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (17 October), as I recently blogged here. For this reason, …

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Why is 17 October such a momentous day for poverty eradication?

Source: https://unrcca.unmissions.org/secretary-general-message-international-day-eradication-poverty Today is 17 October, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.  This day has a long tradition. It was first marked on 17 October 1987, when thousands of people gathered at the Trocadero in Paris to honour people affected by extreme poverty, violence and hunger. Since then, countries, international development organisations and …

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No poverty in our lifetime: is this possible?

https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal1 The primary goal of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDG1) is to end poverty in all forms everywhere. This implies that no single person in any part of the world should be, in any way, poor at any point during our lifetime. Is this actually possible, one might ask? The responses to this …

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What effect does peri-urbanisation have on the Quality of Life of the original inhabitants of peri-urban areas in Zimbabwe?

Sometime in 2019, a colleague in the field of rural and urban (spatial) planning, Jeofrey Matai, and I had a discussion about the escalating rate of peri-urbanisation in Zimbabwe. Most rural areas on the fringes of the country’s established cities, such as Harare, Bulawayo and Mutare,  and towns like Chitungwiza and Plumtree have become predominantly …

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