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Poverty statistics around the world are showing signs of improvement.

Even then, in 2025, about 800 million people worldwide were estimated to be living in extreme poverty – that is, they were living on less than $3 per day. This means that 800 million people across the world live without access to some or all of the basic necessities required to survive and thrive.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 by the United Nations start with the goal to end poverty in the world. Poverty is measured through income, but it is experienced through much more than income alone.

This is why poverty is connected so closely to many of the other Sustainable Development Goals, including ending hunger, improving health, expanding access to quality education, advancing gender equality, providing clean water and sanitation, and creating decent work..

Poverty, thus, has multidimensional effects on individuals and communities. Understanding those effects is important if we are serious about addressing them.

Poverty and economic empowerment

The definition of poverty and experience varies between communities, contexts, and countries.

Since much of it depends on economic and market forces prevalent in said contexts, who is considered poor in the USA will vary largely from who falls below the poverty line in India. One thing remains constant, though – a poor person lacks the economic means to purchase, access and enjoy resources that would have otherwise allowed them to thrive.

When a family does not have enough income to meet all its needs, it must make difficult trade-offs. So, a poor man may send his young children to work or may obligate them to become caregivers for younger or elderly family members. A poor woman whose access to food and safety is limited will commonly not choose to spend money on her daughter’s school fee.

These are not necessarily choices in the ordinary sense. They are decisions made within severe constraints, often to meet the family’s most immediate needs.

How, then, does a family move beyond those constraints and break an intergenerational cycle of poverty?

Poverty and social mobility

Social mobility describes a person’s movement from one economic or social position to another. Upward economic mobility occurs when people gain access to better incomes, greater security, and more opportunities than the generation before them.

A study by economists Gustavo Marrero and Luis Servén examined data from 158 countries between 1960 and 2010. It found a consistently negative relationship between high poverty and subsequent economic growth, particularly in countries where poverty was already widespread. A ten-percentage-point reduction in the poverty rate was associated with an increase of between 0.5 and 1.2 percentage points in annual per-capita economic growth.

In simpler terms, poverty does not merely result from weak economic growth. When poverty is widespread, it can also impede the growth needed to reduce poverty. It becomes a reinforcing cycle.

Moreover, the World Bank’s Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2022 report concluded that, since the 1990s, poverty levels have risen in the world for the first time after the COVID-19 pandemic. Although many countries subsequently returned to pre-pandemic poverty levels, recovery has been markedly slower in low-income countries.

Conflict, climate-related shocks, rising debt and sluggish economic growth continue to make the global goal of ending extreme poverty by 2030 increasingly unlikely.

Progress has not disappeared, but it has become slower and more uneven. The people and countries beginning with the fewest resources also face some of the greatest barriers to recovering.

Poverty and education

The World Bank’s Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2024 report emphasizes that low-income economies must focus on long-term growth, better health and education to roll back poverty. The question, then, remains whether all of these can be made possible through piece-meal efforts of development.

Education can open pathways to further study, meaningful employment, and higher incomes. It can expand a young person’s choices and strengthen the prospects of the family that follows.

But there is more to it than that. A place in a classroom, on its own, cannot remove every barrier poverty creates. When a child is unable to go to school, she is unable to access opportunities for higher education or employment. A child who reaches school needs nutrition and good health to focus on her lessons. Additionally, she also requires safety and informed care, to be able to continue coming to school.

So, as the school becomes the epicentre of long-term growth, we must ask ourselves – what kind of schools are we building, nurturing, and investing in? And, how many mountains of inequality, poor growth, and deprivation could be moved if all children, no matter where they are born, no matter what their families do, were studying, learning, and growing together?

What comprehensive support means in practice

As ‘holistic’ becomes a buzzword in the modern-day social impact world, we ask – what does it really mean?

Christel House functions on the foundation that poverty should not limit potential. Yet, we know that poverty often does, by depleting individuals and families of the support systems and resources they need to fulfill their potential. That understanding has shaped a comprehensive approach to education.

So, our schools are vibrant spaces of learning, safety, and care, where students are supported through their K-12 journeys, and into their careers. We call it full-circle support. In essence, it is the counterresponse to what piece-meal initiatives cannot achieve – long-term growth and prosperity.

The commitment lasts for more than 18 years—from the early school years through Grade 12, and for five years after graduation.

While at its core, poverty is a lack of financial resources, it encapsulates much more for a child (The State of the World Report 2025, UNICEF). It implies inadequate nutrition, poor health, lack of education, and more. “Children face an extreme poverty rate of 32.9 per cent when the household head has no education, compared with just 5.8 per cent when the head has tertiary education,” says the report.

Across Christel House schools, 93% of students graduate from high school and 82% continue into post-secondary education or training. These results do not suggest that one intervention creates economic mobility. They demonstrate what becomes possible when support is sustained across the different stages of a young person’s development.

No one moment or action catapults a child into the future they dream of. It is but patient support from a team who believes in gradually chipping away the debilitating effects of poverty that shapes a student’s journey from home to classrooms to life. Our work supports children as they break out of generational cycles of poverty and buoy their families towards meaningful, thriving lives.

It is a team that stays.

The challenge, then, is not simply to get more children into school. It is to consider what they need to remain there, what enables them to learn, and what support will help turn their education into real choices afterwards.

If poverty affects every part of a child’s life, our response cannot address only one part of it.

So, what would it take—in your community—to ensure that education becomes not merely a place in a classroom, but a genuine pathway to upward economic mobility?

We would like to hear from educators, policymakers, funders, employers, and others working alongside children and families. Write to us to share what comprehensive support looks like in your context, where the gaps remain and what you believe needs to change.