Njuma, aged 70, lives in a remote mountainous area of Uganda. She is largely dependent on gifts of food from relatives and neighbours. They do not wish to see her suffer from hunger but they are also poor and do not see it as their role to provide beyond her minimum nutritional needs. She gets no support from the government or NGOs. She has no access to health services.

Njuma’s main work is gleaning coffee from neighbours’ bushes once they have been harvested. She earns the equivalent of US$0.02-0.03 for each hour she works. Economic surveys and the census would, if they recognised her at all, class her as poor and not working. The reality is that she is employed in some of the lowest paid work in the world.

The Chronic Poverty Report 2004-05 – launched in London on 12 May by the UK chancellor of the exchequer (finance minister) Gordon Brown – estimates that up to 420 million people globally are trapped in chronic poverty. Many of the 100 million poor older people, like Njuma, are chronically poor.

As people age, and income through work declines, they face spiralling debt, hunger and destitution. Age brings with it increasing difficulties in accessing health and other essential services, increasing the likelihood of older people becoming and remaining poor.

Gordon Brown admitted to being shocked by the report’s findings and recognised the need for developed countries to increase spending on aid if the Millennium Development Goals are to be met.

David Hulme, director of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre and one of the report’s authors, said, “livelihood security is the number one issue” and called for wider social protection measures in Poverty Reduction Strategy budgets to target the chronically poor.

A new film made by the UK Government Department for International Development to launch the report highlighted social protection measures such as basic social pensions as effective mechanisms to re-distribute wealth and target development aid to the poorest. Pensions are a practical way to achieve the poverty goal of the Millennium Declaration.

“If people living in chronic poverty are to benefit from economic development and have the chance of escaping from poverty, they need targeted support, social assistance and social protection, and political action that confronts exclusion,” argues the report.

The Chronic Poverty Report 2004-05 is published by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre. CPRC is an international partnership of universities, research institutes and NGOs of which HelpAge International is a partner.