Giving Compass' Take:

· Around the world, 769 million people are living in extreme poverty. With the definition differing among countries, Global Citizen reports that a UN investigator will be investigating extreme poverty in the UK come November to see how bad the situation really is. 

· How can we best eliminate extreme poverty and support those previously affected? What is the best way to address the root causes of poverty? 

· Read about Global Citizen's approach to ending extreme poverty.

Does Britain have a problem with extreme poverty? The United Nations is about to find out.

Globally, extreme poverty is defined as living on less than $1.90 (about £1.50) a day. Between 1990 and 2013, the number of people living in extreme poverty around the world has fallen by 1 billion — over half — to 769 million.

But Professor Philip Alston, a UN human rights and extreme poverty investigator, describes extreme poverty as “a lack of income, a lack of access to basic services, and social exclusion,” according to the Guardian — and in November he will visit the UK to discover if Britain is guilty of meeting that definition.

Alston is what’s known as a “rapporteur”, an independent expert appointed by the UN Human Rights Council to objectively examine how a country is performing on a certain issue.

And now Britain is under the microscope — and Alston has already reached out to British people trapped in poverty to ask them to share their stories.

Read the full article about extreme poverty in the UK by James Hitchings-Hales at Global Citizen.