The West and Its Lack of Empathy in Times of Crisis

It is barely a week since the United Nations adopted the sustainable development goals – the most important of which is the aim to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030 – and already they are having a huge effect. How else, after all, to interpret the World Bank’s recent prediction that extreme poverty will fall below 10 per cent of the global population this year? This will be an even more remarkable achievement given that the bank is now using an updated international poverty line of $1.90 a day, as opposed to $1.25 before.

Of course, I am being slightly facetious in attributing the progress World Bank president Jim Yong Kim announced to the SDGs.