Monday, December 21, 2009

140 million Arabs in poverty says the UN

Nearly 140 million Arabs live below the poverty line. That stat comes from a new report from the United Nations Development Programme and the Arab League.

The report says that 51 million jobs will need to be created by 2020. Even that many jobs will not reduce unemployment in the Arab world, but just maintain the same levels as we have now.

From this AFP article that we found at Yahoo News, we read more about the report's details.

The joint report stressed "there has been no decrease in the rates of poverty in the Arab region over the past 20 years," with some countries actually showing an increase.

"Overall poverty remains high, reaching up to 40 percent on average, which means that nearly 140 million Arabs continue to live under the upper poverty line."

The document entitled "Development Challenges for the Arab Region: A Human Development Approach" also indicated youth unemployment was "the highest in the world" in Arab countries.

"The proportion of young people of the total unemployed population is more than 50 percent for most Arab countries," it said.

1 comment:

poor said...

This is sad to know and something must be done to pull them up.