INTERNATIONAL DAY FOR ERADICATING POVERTY 2025
International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, an international observance celebrated every October 17th is a yearly reminder that ending poverty is not only about income, but about dignity, justice, and social inclusion.
The 2025 observance focuses on a powerful theme: Ending social and institutional maltreatment by ensuring respect and effective support for families. The aim is simple yet urgent, put the weakest into consideration and build institutions that help families stay together, thrive, and shape their own futures.
Families living in poverty are often navigating impossible choices while confronting stigma, scrutiny, and systems that can punish rather than support. Around the world, parents—especially single mothers, Indigenous families, and those from historically discriminated groups—report daily experiences of judgment and control in places meant to help: schools, clinics, child protection offices, welfare agencies.
These interactions too often erode trust, undermine agency, and can even result in family separation due to poverty, with lasting emotional and social harm for children and parents alike.
The 2025 theme is grounded in global consultations with people who have lived experience of poverty and with organizations working alongside them. It calls on all of us—policy makers, practitioners, and communities—to listen to families, recognize their efforts, and transform support systems so they are built on trust, respect, and collaboration.
The International Day provides an important opportunity for people living in poverty to be visible, to have voice and to provide their testimonies on one day of the year. People living in poverty are also empowered because the International Day gives them a sense of belonging in the community, through their participation and involvement in community development programmes.
Most times, poverty is not a personal failure; it is a systemic failure – a denial of dignity and human rights.
This year’s International Day for the Eradication of Poverty calls on us all to stop the social and institutional maltreatment of people living in poverty – and to honour the promise of the Sustainable Development Goals to eradicate poverty in all its forms, everywhere.
Thia requires policies that leave no one behind: affordable health care and housing; decent work and fair wages; social protection; food security; quality education; and financing that works for countries and communities.
On this International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, let’s all reject stigma and discrimination. Let’s stand with people living in poverty, and act with solidarity to end poverty for good.
