President Juan Manuel Santos will present on Monday the government’s National Plan for Social Prosperity, an initiative aimed at eliminating extreme poverty in Colombia.
Santos will make the presentation in Quibdo, Choco, one of the poorest areas of the country, Caracol Radio reports.
Speaking to RCN Radio, the director of government aid agency Social Action, Diego Molano, said that the goal is to utilize various strategies to bring more than 1.5 million Colombians out of extreme poverty over the next four years.
Currently there are 2.8 million Colombians living in extreme poverty while the national figure for all those below or on the poverty line is around seven million. This accounts for approximately 16% of the population, a figure the government wants to see reduced to 9% in the coming years.
Based on the World Bank’s poverty line, people who live on less than $1.25 per day are considered to live in extreme poverty.
Colombia currently also has one of the worst Gini coefficients in the world at 0.578, El Tiempo reported Saturday. This figure measures income distribution on a scale of 0>1, where the closer the figure is to 0, the more equal a society is.