Protecting Women and the Girl Child in Sub-Saharan Africa Against Extreme Poverty and Hunger During a Pandemic: Lessons from Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has tested the capacities of countries across the globe. Since first reported in the Wuhan province of China in December 2019, the pandemic has led to significant loss of human lives with unprecedented challenges to public health systems, food availability, and economic stability. Millions of people are at risk of falling into extreme poverty and are in peril of food insecurity. The United Nations Sustainable Developmental Goals (SDGs) 1 and 2 collectively address poverty, ending hunger, achieving food security, and improving nutrition, which were notably off track for full implementation by 2030, even before the Covid-19 pandemic. This chapter reviews the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on SDGs 1 and 2 and discusses measures to protect the women and the girl child in Sub-Saharan Africa against extreme poverty and hunger resulting from this current and future pandemics. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.

The role of social innovation in tackling global poverty and vulnerability.

Tackling the rapid rise in global poverty is one of the most pressing challenges the world faces today, especially in this new age of turbulence. On top of the ongoing environmental crisis, the last fifteen years has been rocked by the financial crisis of 2007-8, compounded by the 2020 Covid-pandemic and then by the 2022 war in Ukraine, each of which has negatively impacted all aspects of sustainable development. Although in practice many development organizations have been using the methods and processes of social innovation to tackle poverty and vulnerability for many years, it is only recently that they have specifically begun to analyse and codify its contribution to these and other SDGs. Social innovation provides beneficial social outcomes for citizens and other actors, often at local level with the strong bottom-up involvement of civil society and through its cross-actor, cross-sector, cross-disciplinary and cross-cutting strengths. Importantly, it aims to empower those with a social need, particularly when they have little to begin with. It focuses on increasing the beneficiaries' own agency and capability rather than passively only relying on others to act on their behalf. This is done by transforming social relationships and developing new collaborative processes. Amongst a wide range of recent and contemporary sources, this paper analyses a large scale quantitative and qualitative global survey of social innovations that tackle poverty and vulnerability in different global regions. It examines various definitions of poverty, including extreme, absolute and relative measures as well as arguably more useful approaches like the Multidimensional Poverty Index. It proposes how social innovation should be recalibrated to meet the increasing threats of the new age of turbulence, including by deploying the sociological lens of the agency-structure dichotomy to show why the public sector needs to become involved more proactively in social innovation. It also looks at certain myths around poverty and vulnerability, examines why we need to revise our understanding of sustainable development and resilience, and why a new nexus approach is needed that combines SDG1 with other strongly related SDGs.

Protection against Poverty with Particular Reference to the Ilo Commitment

The close relationship between the constitutional mandate of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations 2030 Agenda is evident. In particular, the interconnection is channelled through SDG 8: target 8.1 on GDP growth, target 8.2 on economic productivity and target 8.5 on full and productive employment and decent work for all are essential to ensure poverty reduction under SDG 1. Poverty eradication requires multilateral action, to support countries with a lower level of economic development, and individualised action, in line with a rights-based approach, to combat the social exclusion of the most disadvantaged. The situation of the health, economic and social crisis caused by COVID-19 and its consequences require both approaches. The study is divided into two parts. The first part analyses the concepts of poverty used by the ILO due to its universal and tripartite nature. The second deals with the ILO's normative action and strategic approach, including proposals in the context of the pandemic.

The Economic Perspective of Food Poverty and (In)security: An Analytical Approach to Measuring and Estimation in Italy.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals have set clear targets on global poverty, hunger and malnutrition to be achieved by 2030, which have prompted academics and policymakers to identify useful strategies and drivers. Moreover, the COVID19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities at national and sub-national levels thus hampering the achievement of these goals. On considering the multifaceted nature of poverty, a recent research strand focuses on food poverty and insecurity issues in terms of economic access to food and healthy diet consumption, with moderate and extreme food insecurity affecting almost 9% of the population in Europe and North America. This paper aims to analyse food poverty and insecurity at regional level in Italy. Using micro-data from the Italian Household Budget Survey carried out by ISTAT, an analytical approach was proposed to define and measure the different degree of food poverty and insecurity. Moreover, to obtain insights into whether food poverty and insecurity can afford population healthy nutrition, inequality of the distributions of food expenditure categories are estimated. The results provided us with information on other important aspects of the poverty. Indeed, in Italy individuals who are at-risk-of-food-poverty or food insecure amount to 22.3% of the entire population. Furthermore, the at-risk-of-food-poverty-rate varies at regional level from 14.6% (Umbria) to 29.6% (Abruzzo), with high levels of food consumption inequalities observed above all for vegetables, meat and fish. All these issues could help policy makers to define economic intervention policies aimed at reducing social exclusion and achieving more equitable and sustainable living conditions for the entire population.