Poverty Causes and Effects

Poverty means: the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions


Since in Colombia we have lot’s of poverty I decided to make my post about the effects and causes it has on people. In Cartagena specially is one of Colombia’s most affected city by poverty. People are in the streets begging for money or just a single bread. In “El Pozón” which is the poorest village, there lives all the bad people from Cartagena. Is the most dangerous of all and almost no one goes there.

Some of the types of causes I found on Poverty in Google are:

Individual: Poverty is caused by individual circumstances do to characteristics of poor people.
•amount of education
•skill
•experience
•intelligence
•health
•handicaps
•age
•work orientation
•time horizon
•culture of poverty
•discrimination


Generic: Poverty is also caused by economy problems, such as:
•no jobs opportunities
•inadequate overall demand
•low national income


Effects on Poverty:
Poverty has extremely damaging effects. Many of the effects come from poor nutrition and physical health problems these result from having just a little of few resources. Infant Mortality varies a lot of poor are higher than average and life expectancies are lower than average. Other effects are; disease, metal illness, and drug dependence. Other effects that are very complicated and not really understandable are: studies link to crime, but that doesn’t means that all poor people are criminals or doing vandalism. Crime is not very common in Poverty (except in Cartagena, in here most of the effects are by being poor, they don’t have money so they steal things from other people and also do vandalism) what is most common in poverty in other places are hunger, no job, and that would lead to depression which sometimes can have influence in criminals behavior.


What I really think about poverty is no good for no one. First of all for us, we really don’t care about others people life, we only think of what we have and of who and what we want. If we see a little kid in the street asking for money the first thing that comes to our mind is that he is going to rob your purse or something like that. That may be true. In most of the cases they are just asking for bread and a home to sleep, since their parents have leave him alone given that they couldn’t take care of him do to money problems. What we could do about it? We can give him the piece of bread and also can take him to an orphanage. In fact, Miss Alba, my science teacher, has an orphanage for boys. She goes there like every 2 days in a week and she takes to them cake, coke, candy…etc. She told us one day that if we had some clothe to donate, and most of the boys of my class collaborated. In overall that is the best thing to do an orphanage and to take all the kids and also big people to come to it and can get some help.


I really love children, so what I would like to investigate more about on poverty is the causes children have.