Establishing Professional Contacts and Expanding Resources~~Revisited

I sort of feel like this week was a bust.  Still have not heard a response from any of my attempts at contact ECE professionals from other countries…I attempted to complete an alternate assignment, as indicated in our assignment.  That was a failed attempt as well. We were asked to go to http://www.childhoodpoverty.org and read about poverty in one country and share some insights from our reading.  That web address gave me a server not found message.  I searched up the name of the Childhood Poverty Research and Policy Centre and was redirected to “Over Sea’s Development Institute”. Within the site I was able to locate a working paper called “Who are the poor? New regional estimates of the composition of education and health ‘poverty’ by spatial and social inequalities”.

The paper was a comparison of educational and health poverty in populations of South Asia, South East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. It was somewhat hard to follow, but I got out of it that the level of poverty was lower and child mortality rate was higher for families who had little or no education of the head of household, and those who worked in agriculture or where unemployed.  Basically, this could be said of the United States as well, however the level of actual poverty was considerably lower in these areas of the world compared to the United States.  We see our fair share of poverty in the U.S. but nothing like those in other countries.

I found another paper called “Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015” that puts the problem of global poverty into perspective, and states if every person living in poverty were given $1.25 per day, this would allow them to live just over the international poverty line.  It is estimated that 1.37 billion people worldwide are living under this poverty threshold. This is just shocking to me!

I am going to show you how this relates to us living in the U.S. In Gallatin County, Montana, where I live, the average rate of entry-level pay for a degreed early childhood teacher is $11.75-13.75.  I had an applicant send a resume to be considered for an open position at my school; she is currently making $17.30 an hour in a university food service facility along with state benefits.  She had to turn down my position because I could not pay her that.  I think that folks who are looking to move to Montana do not realize that our wages are much lower than the national average. I would also imagine that means the cost of living is also lower. I think applicants fail to look at that. The international poverty level is drawn at $1.25 per day; this applicant is working in an unrelated field and grosses $138.40 per day plus benefits. You can soon imagine the disparity on a global level.

References

http://www.unicef.org/socialpolicy/index_59345.html

http://www.odi.org.uk/node/12107