Short answers, pulled from the story.
Poverty is a state or condition in which an individual lacks the financial resources and essentials for a basic standard of living. It carries environmental, legal, social, economic, and political causes and effects. The word descends from the Latin pauper, meaning poor.
Absolute poverty refers to a fixed standard, consistent over time and between countries, measuring income against what is needed for basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. Relative poverty is socially defined, measuring when a person cannot meet the living standards of others in the same time and place. In the OECD and EU, the relative line is commonly set at 60 percent of median household income.
In 2015 the World Bank set the absolute poverty line at living on less than 1.90 US dollars per day on a purchasing power parity basis. It stood at 1.08 dollars from 1993 through 2005 and 1.25 dollars in 2009. The threshold is controversial, with critics including UN special rapporteur Philip Alston calling it fundamentally flawed.
In purchasing power terms, 85 percent of people live on less than 30 dollars a day, two-thirds on less than 10 dollars, and 10 percent on less than 1.90 dollars. The World Bank forecast 702.1 million people in extreme poverty in 2015, down from 1.75 billion in 1990. Other estimates place the true scale higher, with 4.3 billion living on less than 5 dollars a day.
Poverty-related causes account for around 18 million deaths a year, roughly 50,000 per day. Malnutrition is present in half of all child mortality cases, and almost 90 percent of maternal deaths in childbirth occur in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In education, students from low-income families are 2.4 times more likely to drop out than middle-income peers and over 10 times more likely than high-income peers.
Strategies include raising farm incomes, since three-quarters of the poor are farmers, and growth in small-farmer productivity is at least twice as effective at helping a country's poorest half. Other approaches include direct income grants, low-cost health interventions such as deworming at about 50 cents per child a year, debt relief, and fertilizer and seed subsidies, which helped Malawi reach record corn harvests in 2006 and 2007.