Why We Don’t Fix What We Can Fix
The most difficult question is not how to solve child poverty. It is why we haven’t.
Humanity has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reduce child suffering when it chooses to prioritize it. Progress is not a mystery. It is a decision. And yet global action has been inconsistent, fragmented and often temporary.
Children are not the priority
A study by the Global Health Policy Center found that preventable childhood deaths receive less than 2% of global charitable funding, despite being among the most cost effective interventions in the entire humanitarian sector. In other words, the world has the capacity to save millions of children but chooses to direct support elsewhere. The imbalance becomes even clearer when examined alongside government spending. In 2023, global military expenditure surpassed $2.4 trillion, while the United Nations’ humanitarian appeal for children received less than one third of the funding required to meet basic needs. These numbers do not reflect a world without resources. They reflect a world where resources are directed according to priorities and children are not the priority.
Another reason for global inaction is psychological distance. Poverty is often framed as a tragedy happening in “other places,” to “other families,” to “other children.” This narrative allows people to feel compassion without responsibility. But the global economy does not operate in isolation. The clothes worn in wealthy countries are often manufactured in factories where parents earn wages too low to provide school supplies or medical care. The food imported to supermarket shelves is sometimes harvested by families whose children drop out of school to support them. The precious minerals inside smartphones and computers — cobalt, lithium, gold — often pass through regions where child labor remains a routine component of production. The point is not to induce guilt, but to highlight reality: we are already connected. We simply fail to act like it.
There is also a damaging cultural myth that poverty results from laziness, irresponsibility or a lack of effort. The evidence proves the opposite. Families living in extreme poverty work among the longest hours, under the harshest conditions, with the fewest protections. When a child dies from diarrhea because clean water is unavailable, when a baby dies from pneumonia because their parents cannot afford antibiotics, that is not failure — it is abandonment by the structures meant to protect them. No amount of determination or work ethic can compensate for the absence of healthcare, nutrition or education.
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
That is why claiming neutrality is not ethically neutral at all. In situations of injustice, refusing to intervene benefits the system that causes the harm. Archbishop Desmond Tutu articulated this truth with painful clarity: