Well more than a quarter of the inhabitants of the so called third world countries still have nothing to live on. Almost one out of every five person, out of the 1.2 billion men, women and children live way below the line of poverty surviving on the equivalent of less, than a dollar a day. Half the people in the world are trying or just manage to survive below the poverty level of two dollars a day. Around 824 million people go hungry or have a very scarce food supply, another 500 million of them suffer serious malnutrition. These facts are only the tip of the iceberg, if I were to continue mentioning each and every stat here in this article, I would probably grow old and die, by the time I finish or may even have a couple left for my descendants to type on.

What I am trying to say is, problems in our lives, every little thing we assume to be the end of the world is literally nothing, zero, just zip… in comparison to what the people in the developing countries or, so to say, the Third World Countries as our Scholars and Journalists like to refer to. Even though no one will ever be bothered, we know; we still have here the top 10 most interesting and probably alien-sounding facts about the Third World Countries.

10. Poverty

Poverty is definitely one of the skeletal reasons of why third world countries are called third world countries. If people weren’t poor, they would live well above the poverty line, that simple, but what exactly is Poverty? You could be wondering. Well as per UN standards I believe, poverty means living on $2.50 a whole day and extreme poverty is living on a $1.25 or less. Around 1 billion of these people are innocent little children, infants. According to the UN approx. 22,000 children die each day in these countries due to poverty.

9. Drinking Water

Ever been in a situation when you were really thirsty and didn’t have any water around you? At least not drinkable water; what would have you done? Probably run down to the nearest store and get a bottle mineral water and quench your ever so unbearable thirst. Well, imagine feeling thirsty and not having any water at all, not around you, not anywhere. No taps, no department stores, no pools, no lakes, not even a river; just the thought of it suffocates you, doesn’t it? More than a billion people do not have adequate access to clean drinking water and estimate 400 million of these are children again.

8. No Electricity Supply

A quarter or more of the entire human population lives without electricity in pitch black darkness as the night falls, along with the eternal darkness that overshadows their fates. That is around 1.6 billion people who do not know something like electricity exists. They are technically still living in Stone Age, no computers, no internet, no appliances, just nothing.

7. Agriculture

More than half the population of all the developing nations in the world depends on Agriculture or farming for survival and for at least two meals a day. That is almost 75 percent of the world’s poorest people, approx. 1.4 billion women, children and men. However, the even more intriguing fact is that 50 percent of hungry people are farming families. A lot of internationally acclaimed projects are carried out every year in order to train and empower these people from such countries to at least to help them learn to live off Agriculture.

6. HIV/AIDS and Other Diseases

HIV is on the verge of becoming the greatest epidemic some of the third world countries have ever seen. Around 40 million people are living with Aids. 65 percent out of them are women. According to a research about 90 percent of all children and 60 percent of all women affected by HIV are living in the sub-Saharan Africa. About other diseases, well more than 11 million children die each year from preventable health issues such as malaria, diarrhea and pneumonia.

5. Health Care

Women, children and men that die every year just because of lack of preventable health care services seem only to be increasing. More than 800 million people have no access to health care, and that’s just a rough calculation, there might be hundreds of thousands not even recorded. As health care isn’t readily available everywhere in the world, this is why most of the entire world’s population dies of silly preventable diseases like common cold and diarrhea.

4. War

Most of the countries that fall in the third world category or the ones that are developing are either facing heavy duty corruption or buried deep under the ashes of war. Civil wars, cold wars, war on religion and so on, are fought no matter how low or pitiful the country’s condition, you might be wondering how? Well it just happens to be the policy of certain country’s to help these third world countries at the time of war for arms and ammunition and medic and supplies for the army just so they could live through the war and pay an even huger amount of debt. Something really inhumane, isn’t it? Well countries like the US, China, Russia have these ill-traits of supporting war.

3. Pollution

Let’s suppose, if one of the countries in the third world is barely hanging on to life overcoming all the problems mentioned above and trying to get through this journey of life, it is however bothered with the nuisance problem of pollution. Pollution as we’ve been studying since 1st grade is destroying our environment and our place of habitat, still nobody seems to be bothered enough, at least none of the industrialized countries with their nuclear toxic power plants seem to be. Air, water or earth pollution is threatening the lives of, not only people in the third world; but everyone on this planet.

2. Social and Cultural Exclusion

Again, a third world country or not social exclusion is basically the state where people lose their self-confidence and bury themselves into deeper and deeper wretched poverty along with greater isolation. With no social and cultural framework, a country can go haywire due to complete loss of morals and ethics from the society. Free will, as great as a gift it is considered to be, will prove to be the worst nightmare for any third world country. No wonder countries like Sierra Leone, Colombia are still in existence.

1. Hunger

More than 870 million people of the entire third world population have no food to eat or a very precarious food supply i.e. more than the population of the US and the European Union combined. Pretty much the entire undernourished population of the world lives in third world countries, like Africa, Somalia and many more, some even unheard of. 60 percent of these hungry are women, 50 percent of pregnant women in developing countries lack proper maternal care, resulting in over 300,000 maternal deaths annually from childbirth. A third of all childhood death in sub-Saharan Africa is caused by hunger related diseases, around 2.6 million deaths per year, one child every five seconds.

Final Conclusion:

It is really surprising how things go around in this small Earth of ours. On one hand we have a small handful of people and their families get the entire resources and facilities and all the good that this world has to offer, whereas more than half of the world’s population is dying because of their fate’s brutality on their lives and the other three quarters are barely managing to keep it up and dying every second of the day, not living life the way it was meant to be lived i.e. abundantly; only in their desperate hopes to create a secure and prosperous lives for their little ones. Being aware about all this and still reading about how 12 percent of the world’s population uses 85 percent of all the water and none of the 12 percent lies in the developing nations, and how less than $40 billion is only required to offer basic education, clean water, and sanitation, reproductive health care for women, and basic health and nutrition to every person in every single developing country; just frustrates us to the core, it does, maybe for a little while, but it surely boils our blood up, however it doesn’t mean we will ever be able to do anything about it, will we?