5.3. Where is poverty and how is it measured?

Lesson 1 Day

Lesson Objectives

  • Task 1: What is human development?
  • One way to measure poverty across countries is to use the Human Development Index (HDI). It is based on the concept of human development, but what does this concept mean? Let's take a look

What is the Human Development Index?

Task 2: Questions on Human Development

  1. Human development involves the improvement in what aspect of our lives?
  2. What are the three attributes of human development?
  3. Fill in the blank: If money can be used for military equipment or for the construction of schools, essentially human development deals with the way societies make ________________.
  4. What is sustainable human development?
  5. Why is sustainable human development becoming more and more important in the 21st century?
  6. Currently our unsustainable rate of consuming the Earth's resources equates to how many earths?
  7. Towards the end of the video, one sustainable practice was illustrated. What was it?
  • Task 3: How is poverty measured?
  • This animation looks at different ways to measure poverty and human well-being with a special focus on the Human Development Index. This includes measures of income, education and health comparing Australia, Bangladesh and Papua New Guinea.

How do we measure poverty?

  • Compare and contrast the measures of income, education and health amongst the countries of Australia, Bangladesh and Papua New Guinea
  • Task 4: Countries with differing levels of human development - complete the table below using information form the following website - http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/human_development.htm

Lesson 2 Day & Lesson 3 Day

Lesson Objectives

  • Task 4: Complete the table below by accessing the World Bank website - http://data.worldbank.org/indicator
  • From the information in the table above, are there any conclusions you can come to about the level of poverty in different parts of the world.
  • Extension Task: Take five more indicators specifically related to Poverty and complete a table with the same eight countries
  • Task 5: You will be placed into groups of 3/4. Using the World Bank website http://data.worldbank.org/indicator, you need to choose five countries (not countries identified in Task 4) and five different development indicators which represent different dimensions of poverty. Construct a table and place your information into it.
  • Once you have completed the table, you will need to design a presentation using Google Slides to communicate the information in the table.
  • You will need to decide collaboratively how you are going to communicate this information. For example, will you illustrate the countries' performance via each indicator separately, or will you connect one country with one indicator?