Causes of poverty

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Structural causes (global rules, colonial legacies, geography), conflict, weak or corrupt governance, and the self-reinforcing poverty trap — usually interacting.

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A cause built into the rules and systems people live under — beyond any individual's control — such as global trade rules, colonial legacies and geography.

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Lasting economic and institutional damage left by colonial rule — extractive economies built to export raw materials, arbitrary borders and weak institutions.

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War destroys livelihoods and infrastructure, displaces people, and deters investment, pushing populations into deprivation and keeping them there.

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Poor or corrupt governance means poor services, unstable rules and diverted resources, so people cannot rely on the state to help them escape poverty.

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A self-reinforcing cycle where poor health, poor schooling and no savings make it hard to escape poverty, so it reproduces itself across generations.

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Because each deprivation feeds the others — poor health undermines schooling, poor schooling limits earnings, low earnings prevent investment — so effort alone rarely breaks the cycle.

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Whether poverty is caused mainly by the systems people are born into (structure) or by their own choices and effort (agency).

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That poverty is mostly structure constraining agency: people make real choices, but within systems that heavily shape — and usually narrow — what is possible.

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Because it ignores the powerful structures — rules, history, conflict, weak states — that shape which choices are even available to people.

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Because it drives the cure: blaming choices leads to individual solutions, while recognising structures and traps leads to systemic ones.