FORUM: "
Ending social and institutional maltreatment by ensuring respect and effective support for families."
International Day for the Eradication of Poverty 2025. The observance this year underscores that
ending poverty is about dignity, justice, and belonging, not just income. This year's theme focuses on
ending social and institutional maltreatment by
ensuring respect and effective support for families, with a clear goal:
put the furthest behind first and
build institutions that help families stay together, thrive, and shape their own futures.
Families in poverty often face stigma and punitive practices in places meant to help: schools, clinics, welfare offices, and child protection systems.
Single mothers,
Indigenous families, and
historically discriminated groups report judgment and control that erode trust and agency, sometimes culminating in
poverty-driven family separation with lasting
emotional and social harm to children and parents. To change course, the Day’s theme urges three shifts:
- From control to care: Design services that start with trust. Reduce punitive conditionalities, streamline documentation, and prioritize respectful, person-centred interactions.
- From surveillance to support: Rebalance investments away from monitoring and removal toward family-strengthening services: income support, quality childcare, adequate housing, mental health care, parenting support, and access to justice.
- From top-down to co-created solutions: Involve families living in poverty at every stage—assessment, design, budgeting, delivery, and evaluation—so policies reflect real needs and constraints.
Supporting families advances multiple SDGs (
Sustainable Development Goal 1, the
Sustainable Development Goal 2, the
Sustainable Development Goal 3, the
Sustainable Development Goal 4, the
Sustainable Development Goal 5, the
Sustainable Development Goal 8, the
Sustainable Development Goal 10, the
Sustainable Development Goal 16) through coherent, jointly delivered policies across social protection, education, health, housing, and employment. With people-centered development gaining momentum ahead of the
Second World Summit for Social Development in Doha (4–6 November 2025), this agenda translates commitments into concrete, measurable change by
respecting, protecting, and supporting families. Follow the conversations with the hashtags:
#Dignity4All,
#PovertyDay,
#17october,
#EndingPoverty,
#GlobalGoals,
#SDG1.
Statement of the United Nations Secretary-General on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty 2025; October 17th.Too often, people living in poverty are blamed, stigmatised, and pushed into the shadows.
Yet 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.
That requires policies that leave no one behind: affordable health care and housing; decent work and fair wages; universal 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 reject stigma and discrimination. Let’s stand with people living in poverty, and act with solidarity to end poverty for good.
António Guterres.
On the
International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) renews its resolve to eradicate poverty and advance shared prosperity. This year’s theme, “Ending social and institutional maltreatment by ensuring respect and effective support for families”, reminds us of the need to uphold the dignity of every family.
The 2025 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) by UNDP and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative reveals that nearly 80 percent of the world's multidimensionally poor people - 887 million individuals - now live in areas exposed to at least one major climate hazard: high heat, drought, floods, or air pollution. Some 650 million poor people face two or more hazards at the same time.
This new MPI matters because it allows us to see poverty as people live it: income poverty and lack of choices compounded by climate risk and inequality. Poverty is about more than not having enough money. It also means not having access to basic services or support systems. Therefore, UNDP works with countries to build institutions that people can trust and that help families through social protection, quality services, and climate action.
Ending poverty in all its forms, everywhere, remains a defining promise of our time. It is one we can keep by ensuring that every family can live with dignity, security, and the power to shape its own future.
Haoliang Xu, UNDP Acting Administrator and Associate Administrator.
PUBLICATION: Read the World Social Report 2025 entitled ''
A New Policy Consensus to Accelerate Social Progress''.
LIVESTREAM: Family policies must be an integral part of overall development efforts and leveraged in achieving many of the interrelated Sustainable Development Goals (poverty eradication, food security, quality healthcare and education, gender equality, social inclusion, decent work/social protection, just and peaceful institutions.) Families are active agents in development. Therefore, their experiential knowledge and insight must be sought out and included to ensure effective support to lift people out of poverty and create a more just and equitable society. The 2025 commemoration will focus on ensuring respect and effective support for families. We need to better understand why poverty persists and why despite all the efforts made by parents, their children continue to experience the same deprivation. We need to better understand the reality of poverty as experienced by the people affected, so that appropriate support can be actioned. By
focusing on families, we continue to highlight the
hidden dimensions of poverty — in particular the social and institutional maltreatment they suffer in their daily lives, including situations of family separation due to poverty, and the pressing need to end it. Related Documents:
Concept note and final programme
