Tool "A Dollar a day"

Language: English

Project Featuring This Tool: Peers without Frontiers

Themes:Poverty

Overview: This activity looks at the kinds of food that we eat and starts us thinking about the cost of food. Using a practical exercise, the young people should get an idea of money, the cost of food and also how to budget. The exercise will explore how hard it is to live on $1.25 a day and how it is cheaper to live if you have more money than if you are poor.

Objectives:

  • To raise awareness of the $1.25 a day poverty threshold
  • To explore how to budget and think about money
  • To think about the cost of food and raw materials
Time 2 hours
Approximate number of participants 15+
Age under 10
Date published 3 Feb 2011, 16:48

Materials

  • Magazines, photos and images with food on
  • Pens
  • Paper
  • Glue
  • Either access to a supermarket or online/home shopping.

Setting

Preparation:

  • You could ask everyone to come to the session with an idea of what food they like to eat. This should be the food that they normally eat throughout the day. This could be prepared in the form of a diary or even better a photo or drawing of it. This preparation can also be done at the beginning of the session
  • Try and arrange permission of the local supermarket/mar­ket/shop to go around. (You don’t need it, but shop owners like to be asked before.)

Step-by-step instructions

1.Ask each of the young people to think about the food that they eat on most days (breakfast, lunch, dinner etc). Get them to draw the food/ find photos of the food and stick it down on the sheet of paper. (15 minutes)

2.Ask them to think of what ingredients are in the food. This doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should get them thinking about what the food is made of. Draw arrows on the photo to each of the items of food and name it. (Maybe have some recipes of popular foods available for them to think about. For example if they have Spaghetti Bolognese then it would include pasta, tomatoes, minced meat, onions and other vegetables.)

3.Ask them to think about their favorite meal (this should be a whole meal, not just a snack). Get them to make a list of ingredients for this meal. (15 minutes)

4.Ask them to think how much of each ingredient they need for one person.

5.Go to the supermarket. In small groups the participants should look around the shop for the ingredients that they have written down. They can’t split anything (so if the smallest packet is 500g then they have to record that packet).

6.Ask them to record the price against each packet and then at the end total it together. 7.Get them to come back together when they are finished. Ask them if with $5 (or equivalent in local currency) they could buy the ingredients of their favourite food. 8.Give each person the equivalent of $1.25. Ask them to go around in their groups and buy food that would fill them up for the whole day. (They don’t have to buy the food; it is enough to make a list of prices). (60 minutes)

Debriefing

9.Bring them back together and ask if they were able to get all the food that they wanted with $1.25? 10 Let them enjoy what they bought. 11.Explain some facts (can be found on http://www.un.org/…overty.shtml):

  • 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day
  • 27 % of people in developing regions live in extreme poverty
  • The global economic crisis has made an additional 64 million people have less than a $1.25 a day just in 2010.

Remind them that $1.25 a day is not just for food, but also for all other things. Ask the participants to imagine their parent/ carer only getting $1.25 a day to pay for all the bills, TV, food etc.

  • How does it make them feel when they couldn’t afford to buy the food that they wanted?
  • How do they feel if they don’t get enough food sometimes?
  • How would it make them feel if they could never afford proper food?
  • Did they notice that things were cheaper if they brought them in bigger packets?
  • Did this help them on a small budget?
  • Who benefits from food being sold in bulk?

Attached files