Health
Poverty and health are inextricably linked. The more a child suffers from poverty, the more prone the child is to illness, disease and malnutrition. As children and their families become more susceptible to health problems, their ability to earn an income to survive is diminished. It is a vicious and unmerciful cycle.
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Other Issues
Malaria
In the time it takes to tie your shoelaces, a child has died from malaria; in fact, every 30 seconds, a child dies from malaria, amounting to over one million child deaths per year.
What's most startling isn't just the statistic - it's that malaria is preventable with proper precaution. Children are dying from malaria, mostly, because they can't afford those precautions.
Malaria is more prevalent now than it was decades ago. The spread of malaria can be attributed to several factors, including environmental disturbance, malnutrition, the ineffectiveness of drugs that once controlled the disease and the inability of families to afford preventative medicine and bed nets.
For the child survivors of malaria, the disease leaves a legacy of problems. Children often miss weeks of school while they are sick, and because the disease is reoccurring, the chances of getting a proper education are slim. The entire family unit can also be affected when a child is sick, as the extra medical costs, the inability for the child to perform chores and the need for a guardian to care for the sick child take their toll.
Malnutrition
It's startling to see a child who looks like she's six years old tell you she's ten. Her body hasn't developed properly, and probably never will, because she's suffered from chronic hunger. When a child is malnourished, especially during the critical first years of life, the child's mental and physical development may be seriously affected.
Children who are malnourished are more susceptible to disease, dehydration and underdevelopment. Malnutrition is a direct result of extreme poverty. Three hundred million children go to bed hungry every day and every 3.6 seconds a person starves to death, a majority of which are young children.
The ability for many people living in extreme poverty to obtain sufficient food on a daily basis is a daily struggle, which is perpetuated by land degradation and declining soil fertility, the AIDS pandemic, war and displacement and trade agreements.