What is a Poverty Trap?

Reflection/What I learned: This lesson went into depth into explaining the concept of a "poverty trap". A poverty trap is initially a sequence of unintentional, unable to be helped, unfortunate events stemming from being poor. It is somewhat a mechanism that creates an economically unstable lifestyle that they can  never escape. The professor uses the example of someone that she met in Indonesia that was actually engaged in the phenomenon of a "poverty trap". This person lost their job because of budget cuts in the company that they were employed in. Because of this, the person's son had to drop out of school and begin to work. The dropping out of school/lack of education is going to make it difficult to obtain a higher wage earning job, and the person has now become more psychologically "down" so to speak and is not planning on searching for another job. They are then unable to save large sums of money because of their economic struggle, and a multitude of other factors make it difficult or impossible for them to climb out of their "poor" lifestyle. A poverty trap can be displayed on an "S" shaped graph.
Explained best by the powerpoint in the class:
–  For poor people, income grow slowly, so slowly that income tomorrow is below income today: the poor become poorer (up to a point)

–  At some point, the rate of growth of income start increasing: income yesterday becomes larger than income today: the middle class and the somewhat rich continue to be rich. 

How this relates: This is easily relatable to the World Food Prize paper that I wrote because though the example the professor gave was of an Indonesian man, this is without a doubt present in Sudan as well. A family member loses their job, they can't fund hardly anything else, the entire situation spirals downwards, and there is no way out. It is extremely unfortunate but sadly it is quite common.