Autumn 2000 City Front Fighting Urban Poverty Around the World Rural poverty continues to claim greater attention from many development agencies, but national and international organizations, activists, and thinkers are starting to identify urban poverty as the bigger challenge at the dawn of a new century.
Population trends do much to explain the newfound concern.
The urban population throughout much of the world is growing rapidly. This year, that number is expected to reach 2.85 billion, or half the world's population. Many of these new urbanites will be impoverished or close to impoverished unless steps are taken to generate new wealth and redistribute existing wealth within and among nations. At the bottom of the income scale in developing world cities are the permanently unemployed. Usually uneducated, sometimes suffering from physical or mental disabilities, these people are the beggars of the Third World and the poorest residents of the poorest squatters' communities.