Poverty is a difficult word to define because everyone’s experience of it is different. Because it is difficult to measure concepts such as hunger, disease and fear, the World Bank introduced the “one-dollar-definition“, which is now generally accepted. According to this definition, people are classified as living in extreme or in absolute poverty if they have less than one US dollar a day to live on.
This definition is based on people’s financial resources, it is therefore also known as the “resource approach“ to development. Another approach to the question of “who is poor?“ is supplied by the so-called “human development approach“.