The effects of poverty on children are wide-reaching and can lead to lifelong struggles, especially when young people don’t receive full educations.
Poverty and education are inextricably linked, because people living in poverty may stop going to school so they can work, which leaves them without literacy and numeracy skills they need to further their careers. Their children, in turn, are in a similar situation years later, with little income and few options but to leave school and work.
Child Fund aims to help families escape the cycle of poverty through various educational and livelihood programs. Many times, we learn by listening to communities about their specific needs and working to fulfill them.
The Effects of Poverty on Education
In many countries where Child Fund works, school is free, but there are additional costs for uniforms, books and transportation, especially in rural areas, where a student may travel more than an hour each way by public bus to school. The expenses may be too much for a family to pay, on top of the money the family loses by not sending a child to work or even marrying off a daughter.
Some countries’ governments also spend a lower share of their gross domestic product (GDP) on education, which makes public education less available (particularly to the poor) and of lower quality. Overcrowded classrooms, broken desks, no computers — all are common sights in school districts with budgets that don’t meet students’ needs. Teachers burn out or may be unqualified to teach certain subjects. All of these challenges create a serious disadvantage for children growing up in poor households. 
The Importance of Education in Developing Countries
The importance of education in developing countries cannot be overstated. Education can be the catalyst needed to pull families and communities out of the cycle of poverty. Knowledge gives children the power to dream of a better future and the confidence needed to pursue a full education, which in turn will help generations to come.
Education also makes a significant difference for adults, particularly when it applies to day-to-day life, including nutrition, healthcare and gender equity. When adults learn, they become role models to their children, who also wish to learn. 
Education Improves Food Security and Reduces Malnutrition
When people learn about agriculture and farming techniques, they gain the ability to grow and maintain healthy crops, which provide vegetables for meals and additional income. Families also learn what nutrients their children need for healthy development, as well as foods pregnant women need to eat to promote their babies’ growth.
Education Improves Standards of Health
Literacy is key to good health because women need to be able to read about prenatal vitamins and other health information during their pregnancies. This, in turn, reduces the rates of prenatal and maternal mortality, and improves children’s health, too. The ability to read also is important in educating communities about clean water and sanitation, particularly if families need to use filters or boil water before drinking it to avoid waterborne illnesses. Other examples abound, including emergency notices about the Zika virus, Ebola or HIV. Reading keeps people healthier in many ways.
Education Reduces the Spread of Communicable Diseases
The spread of disease in developing countries is often exacerbated by a lack of public knowledge about how it is transmitted. In 2014 and 2015, youth groups in West Africa helped spread the word about prevention of the Ebola virus, particularly the need to avoid traditional burial practices that spread the deadly disease. Especially when local, trusted voices convey this lifesaving information, communities are receptive to learning. Even in non-emergency situations, education about the spread of disease is important.
Education Improves Gender Equity
Educating women and girls about reproductive healthcare and their rights regarding marriage empowers them to make decisions about their lives. Early marriage and pregnancy cut educations short and often lead to underweight, undernourished children, as well as domestic violence. When girls stay in school longer, they are less likely to marry before age 18 and have children early, and they’re more likely to find rewarding work after leaving school. Approximately 39,000 under-aged girls marry each year, some as young as 8 or 9. Community-wide education helps everyone understand the harm of this practice.  
Breaking the Cycle of Poverty Through Education
Education in all different forms is key to breaking the cycle of poverty. It has an uplifting effect on other aspects of society that may seem totally unrelated, such as girls’ education lowering the number of prenatal deaths. The relationship between poverty and education is complex, but we know that education helps people make healthier and smarter decisions about their children, their livelihoods and the way they live.
Education also has a significant role in the fight for children’s rights, both in teaching children what they can and should expect from adults, and in showing adults the benefits of respecting their children’s rights. In Timor-Leste, children have stepped forward to advocate for their rights in school through the Children Against Violence project. Touring around the country, they raise awareness of corporal punishment through theatrical drama. In this and many other cases, education is a powerful tool that can make the world a better place.

Climate change is one of the most important problems we face. It is also truly a global problem in the sense that no country alone can influence the outcome. It can only be solved if all countries mount a global response. With development activities picking up once again, it’s important to keep in mind that we’re already fighting climate change and global warming. Our choices, actions and behaviour should be based on that premise so that we can inch closer to reducing the impact of climate change.
India is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, and will be severely affected with an increase in natural calamities such as floods, tsunamis, droughts, and heat waves. Our country has already taken a few progressive steps such as the target of clean energy and reduction in emissions by 22 per cent. In fact, extensive plantation efforts, water body rejuvenation, and buying local and organic produce are already being encouraged and implemented. However, regardless of the policies and strategies implemented by the government, our environment will heal only if ‘care for nature’ comes naturally to us.
While you might think that climate change policies and strategies are the work of the government and political bodies, this is a reminder that we are going through the repercussions of climate change as a country. It is each individual’s responsibility to do their bit in making the fight against climate change easier and more effective. Healing the environment starts in the kitchen, in our bedrooms, at work, and even in the garage.
To prevent further decline in our environmental health, we need to be wary of every small action that can contribute to temperature rise, sea-level rise, and pollution. We need to reduce emissions of Green House Gases, especially carbon dioxide and devise eco-friendly substitutes to products that have a high carbon footprint.
In fact, knowing your carbon footprint is an excellent way to make small and easy changes at home and office. To underline the importance of this issue, organizations can encourage activities that cap emissions and reward employees when they achieve a low carbon footprint. This could be an incentive to reduce polluting behaviours and to invest in cleaner energy choices.
Increasing energy efficiency and promoting renewable energy is also crucial to reduce pressure on our natural resources. So many people in India still lack access to electricity and rely on solid fuels for cooking such as coal, wood, and charcoal which causes harmful indoor air pollution. Opting for energy-efficient appliances, using LEDs and using renewable energy is a great way to not only mitigate climate change but also let businesses know that the demand for renewable energy sources is on rise. Given the extreme climate conditions that India faces and the loss of life and economy attributed to it, India should also strengthen its current targets and given its immense renewable energy generation potential, aim to lead by setting an example.

If the United States’ Pledge of Allegiance were rewritten for the world of the twenty-first century, the clause “and justice for all” could well be changed to “and climate justice for all,” given that issue’s paramount importance. A painful lesson from the last few decades – not only in the US but around the world – is that the adverse effects of climate change are not distributed equitably among countries and communities. While the climate crisis has devastating implications for all of us, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres rightly points out that “the poor and vulnerable are the first to suffer and the worst hit.”
According to the world’s authoritative climate-science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), declines in crop production and quality, increases in crop pests and diseases, and other disruptions have disproportionally affected the poor, just as increasingly frequent and extreme heat disproportionally threaten children and the elderly. As climate change simultaneously disrupts food, human, water, and ecosystem security, we can expect many more adverse cascading effects.
Extreme flooding, for example, is expected to become twice as frequent in the flood-prone areas that are home to some 450 million people. More broadly, the IPCC points to 2017 research showing that by 2030, 122 million people (mostly the poorest 20 per cent across 92 countries) could be pushed into extreme poverty by higher food prices and other climate-driven income losses.
Compounding the injustice, the biggest contributors to climate change are not necessarily those most affected by it. According to a 2020 report by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, between 1990 and 2015, the richest 1 per cent of the global population accounted for twice the carbon dioxide emissions relative to the poorest 50 per cent.
Yet poor countries bear a larger share of the costs, simply because around 75 per cent of people living in poverty depend on agriculture, which is extremely sensitive to irregularities in weather and broader climatic changes. Poor countries are also more prone to resource conflicts, and they tend to lack adequate technology, infrastructure, policies, and resources for adaptation.
Moreover, climate change amplifies pre-existing forms of inequality and drives more migration and forced displacements. In Latin America, one of the most unequal regions in the world, many native groups – such as the Guna people in Panama, the inhabitants of the Mexican state of Chiapas, and some Aymaran groups in Bolivia – have lost their towns to rising sea levels, drought, water scarcity, deforestation, changing rainfall patterns, and natural disasters. Worse, when these groups are forced to leave their traditional lands, they often end up in urban slums, where they face double discrimination as migrants and indigenous peoples.
This human tragedy is growing in scale. The UN World Migration Report 2022 notes that in 2020, natural disasters, extreme temperatures, and droughts displaced 30.7 million people in 144 countries and territories. And contrary to popular belief, the report explains that most new internal displacement in Latin America and the Caribbean that year was due to natural disasters, rather than to violence and conflict.
Climate change also has unequal adverse effects on health and education. The UN’s Human Development Report 2019 forecasts that between 2030 and 2050, climate change will cause some 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea, dengue, and heat stress. And rising temperatures will increase malnutrition and food insecurity and expand the geographical range of disease-transmitting mosquito species, hampering school attendance, performance, and achievement.
These problems have made climate-justice policies and strategies essential to the Global South, and particularly to Latin America. Policymakers will need to focus on ensuring a fairer distribution of obligations and duties not just between states but also across segments of the population and between generations.
Furthermore, climate justice demands that developed countries and multinational corporations assume responsibility for the negative externalities they generate. They must pay their “climate debt” to the rest of the world and acknowledge the intergenerational implications of climate-driven inequality. Like the poor today, younger and future generations will pay the biggest price for a problem they didn’t cause.
This year’s international gatherings at the UN General Assembly and the Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh will succeed only if the international community makes progress toward a new framework to provide developing countries with the financial and technological support they need to adapt to climate change.
Though concrete measures to deliver climate justice are well known, they have proved difficult to implement. Still, there have been promising steps in the right direction. In the US, for example, the Biden administration has launched a “whole-of-government initiative” (Justice40) to ensure that federal agencies deliver 40 per cent of the overall benefits of clean energy, sustainable housing, and clean water to underserved communities. It has also created an Environmental Justice Advisory Council that other countries should consider replicating.
Although major economies bear the largest responsibility for curbing the devastating effects of climate change, all countries must adopt responsible policies to mitigate the damage and protect their most vulnerable inhabitants.
In Costa Rica, we understood the importance of enacting such policies very early on. That allowed us to become an early leader in renewable energy and the first tropical country to halt and then reverse deforestation. Sustainability policies have improved conditions for indigenous and vulnerable communities here as well as in Colombia and Ecuador, by helping communities find new ways to increase income (diversification of means of life) and promote climate-aware and resilient agriculture techniques (such as retaining soil moisture or using crop varieties better adapted to droughts).

The integrated model brings together knowledge of multiple disciplines and different methods of research in a single curriculum. Graduates of STEM courses should be educated about social health protection and have increased awareness of various cultural, socio-environmental and economic contexts for the potential for creative solutions. Only an integrated approach in higher education can make possible intellectual engagement, policy-based solutions and dynamism.
Academic structure around the world Driven by market values, privatization of higher education and utilitarianism. Graduates from this academic environment are expected to become part of the working population in a short span of time. There is a general perception that there are fewer business opportunities for arts and social science graduates than for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) or commerce.
The Covid pandemic has further strengthened this perception. As a result the resources of the arts and humanities faculties have been drastically cut. on a global scale Many programs and courses related to arts and humanities have also been closed. What should happen is that there should be a balance between technology and the arts and the humanities. It is worth noting in this context that the National Academy of Engineering in the US has identified major global challenges in a report, ‘Grand Challenges for Engineering’.
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers Strategy Vision 2030 and the National Academy of Sciences also recommend that solutions to societal challenges look beyond technical knowledge should go. Several other studies in different contexts have also reached the same conclusion. The pandemic has taught us that the solution to the world’s gravest problems lies in the continued cooperation of all disciplines. We not only need subjects related to arts, sociology and humanities, but their inclusion in engineering and STEM degree courses is equally essential.
The engineering curriculum in higher education has focused so much on technical education that subjects with human values such as arts and sociology There is an indifference towards him. Usually engineering students study some subjects from the list of approved courses in arts and humanities only to meet the requirements of education, which have no relation with each other. In countries like the US, 15-20 percent of the curriculum for a bachelor’s degree in engineering is related to the arts and humanities.
At the same time, about 10 percent of the courses for bachelor’s degree in Indian Institute of Technology ie IIT are related to arts and humanities. National technology in institutes it is less than three percent, whereas in many engineering colleges in different states, arts and humanities courses are not available at all. There can be some exceptions. Huge progress has been made in the technical field in the last few decades.
In this dynamic, evolving environment, there is a special need for the graduates to be able to communicate their ideas clearly, to solve unexpected problems or to work well in a group to enable them to be present and future. from such an education in which tomorrow Thoughtfully integrated into the engineering curriculum, education and humanities courses enhance the capacity for critical review, the ability to interact, the ability to work together, and the potential for lifelong learning. Hence, we need education beyond technical training to graduates to meet the challenges of the future, which integrates various disciplines like arts, humanities, sciences, social sciences, engineering and mathematics. This integrated model of education provides a wide range of knowledge and research across multiple disciplines in a single curriculum.
Brings together ways where students can understand the interrelationship between these disciplines and enrich their learning by successful use and experimentation. Ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities and make informed decisions in challenging situations. Also be able to provide appropriate engineering solutions considering their impact in global economic, environmental and social contexts. Some research indicates that the integration of the arts, humanities, and engineering into higher education has a positive impact.
A results have been found. It develops a number of skills such as critical thinking process, ethical decision making, problem-solving and mutual cooperation, which increase employability. This integrated approach also enhances the participation of women and marginalized sections as a social-reform tool. Graduates of STEM courses must be educated about social health, safety and have increased awareness of various cultural, social, environmental and economic contexts to have the potential for creative solutions. High only an integrated approach to education can make possible intellectual engagement, policy-based solutions and dynamism. The integrated curriculum calls for a fresh-minded global initiative, in which institutions and academia will have to come forward.