Lesson 1: What it means to be human Global inequalities
Learning outcome 1.3
Learning outcome 1.4 Students should be able to explain a hierarchy of human needs and how this relates to human rights.
Students should be able to access and interpret numerical data showing local and global distribution of basic resources and patterns of inequalities.
Exercise 13A Using statistics to identify differences between the Global North and the Global South
Key Skills Success criteria
I can name and explain diff erences between the Global North and Global South.
The terms ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ or ‘developed countries’ and ‘developing countries’ are often used when talking about global inequality. Countries in the Global North tend to be wealthy, more economically developed, with less inequality in how wealth is shared. Countries in the Global South tend to be poorer, have less developed economies, more inequalities in how the wealth is shared and are more recent democracies or are not democratic. Many of these countries are also former colonies of northern countries. A colony is an area controlled by another country. Many European countries had colonies in Africa, Asia, America and Oceania during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
A 2014 Oxfam report found that the richest 85 people in the world control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population (almost 4 billion people). The population of the Global North is only about 25% of the total population of the world, yet it controls about 80% of global income.
The map shows the Global North countries in blue and the Global South countries in red.