The Poverty Wheel

Wess Stafford, in his book Too Small to Ignore, presents the best way of understanding it that I’ve found: the poverty wheel. In the center of the wheel, the hub, there is absolute poverty. The outer rim represents enough. The opposite of poverty isn’t wealth – it’s enough. Enough food to live, enough shelter to remain safe and dry, enough opportunity to become a self-sustaining member of society, enough dignity to be the person God created you to be. The six spokes of the wheel represent the various areas of life that must be intact for “enough” to occur. The spokes are economic, educational, health, environmental, social, and spiritual. As with an actual wheel, each spoke is necessary for the stability of the whole. When one spoke is weak, it has an impact on all the others.

"Poverty is hunger. Poverty is lack of shelter. Poverty is being sick and not being able to see a doctor. Poverty is not having access to school and not knowing how to read. Poverty is not having a job, is fear for the future, living one day at a time. Poverty is losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water. Poverty is powerlessness, lack of representation and freedom."

• Economic. This is the one everyone thinks of when they think of poverty – not enough money. In many urban areas of developing nations, there are few jobs that provide adequate income for unskilled labor. More than 1 billion people – one in five – live on less than $1 per day.
• Education. Education equals opportunity, and without it, many stay trapped in the cycle of poverty. When education is present, people gain confidence and learn skills to become self-sustaining.
• Health. Many don’t have the knowledge to keep themselves healthy and lack the resources to take care of themselves when they become ill. For example, one of the world’s biggest killers is diarrhea. Mothers who haven’t been educated otherwise stop giving water to children with diarrhea – thinking they have too much water in them. The children die of dehydration. Measles is still a leading cause of death in children, even though a safe vaccine has been available for 40 years. Malaria kills 1 million children each year, even though a bed net treated with insecticide that costs just $10 could save them.
• Environment. Each year, over 5 million children die from illnesses and other conditions caused by their environments. For example, 40 million people in Indonesia don’t have access to safe drinking water, and contaminated water is one of the sources of one of the world’s leading killers, diarrhea.
• Social. A culture or government that devalues humans deepens poverty. Child soldiers, child trafficking, a lack of education for women, unfair work practices – all are symptoms of unjust social structures and reinforce poverty.
• Spiritual. Few of us think of spirituality when we think of poverty, but the truth is you can be economically wealthy and spiritually poor. Poverty can be a spiritual issue. Spiritual darkness causes behaviors that can create poverty, the despair that compounds it, and our own inaction in the face of it.