“We will join forces to end absolute poverty by 2030,” World Bank president Jim Yong Kim announced in Japan on June 1.

Since the beginning of June, Kim has travelled the world repeating his bank’s commitment to raise every single human being on the planet above the bare minimum of $1.25 per day.

“But ending extreme poverty is not enough,” Kim told economists and development experts at the fifth Tokyo International Conference on African Development. “We’ll work with countries to nurture economic growth that favours the relatively disadvantaged in every society. We’ll track progress by monitoring income growth among the poorest 40 per cent of people in every country.”

“It’s not that ambitious of a goal,” said John Dillon, economic justice co-ordinator for Canada’s Christian social justice coalition KAIROS. “The definition they use is $1.25 a day. I just had a cup of coffee that cost me $1.50.”

The World Bank isn’t claiming it will eliminate extreme poverty by itself. It is calling on countries and international bodies to work with it. The world’s faith communities should have a role as well.

“There definitely is a role for faith-based organizations,” said Dillon.

But there’s no straight line from here to a world without poor people. In 1990 about a third of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. By 2004 that figure had fallen to about a fifth. This perhaps unprecedented victory in the war on human misery is attributable mainly to China.

Beginning in the 1990s, Chinese leaders began to regard eight and nine per cent annual growth as a bad year for their economy. Market reforms, immense investments in infrastructure and city building and free universal education came together to raise hundreds of millions of Chinese out of abject poverty.

Once China and its highly centralized government set its course toward prosperity, it was hard to stop. But that’s not a model that can easily be applied to the rest of the world, said Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace executive director Michael Casey.

“The second half of this isn’t going to be as easy as the first half. There’s a number of variables at play,” Casey said. “There’s still half the number of poor people in the world who are not in conditions that are China… It’s the smaller, more fragile states, countries with a lot of problems that are going to be much more persistent.”

Real progress on behalf of a billion people who face daily hunger and homelessness is possible, according to Casey. But he’s not convinced the problem will just go away.

“Total elimination? I think that’s a bit idealistic,” he said. “Real, hard-core poverty gets lost in the lustre of these global statistics.”

But even in Africa, home to half the world’s extreme poverty, economic growth can benefit the poorest, Kim claims. The 10 fastest growing African economies grew an average of 4.7 per cent in 2012.

“The growth has had an impact on poverty,” said Kim. “The poverty rate has been falling at one percentage point a year. And for the first time the absolute number of people living below $1.25 a day is falling — by more than nine million in the last three years.” The world’s NGOs and development agencies have rarely claimed the World Bank as an ally.

The World Bank’s official purpose is elimination of extreme poverty and it has for years measured its efforts in terms of Millennium Development Goals, including universal primary education, reductions in child mortality, gender equality, improved maternal health, progress against AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases of poverty.

However KAIROS, Development and Peace, Oxfam and many others have accused the bank of an excessive dedication to market- based solutions, structural adjustment programs that cripple governments and even “trickle down” economics. Since 1989 the World Bank’s articles of agreement say all decisions must be directed toward promotion of foreign investment and international trade and the facilitation of capital investment.

In 2005, 225,000 supporters of Development and Peace signed postcards urging Canada to use its vote on the World Bank board to end the practice of placing strict conditions on loans to poor countries that result in privatizing everything from water to health services.

There’s no doubt a mixed economy is more successful than any other model in eliminating poverty because it facilitates investment, said Dillon. But not all investment is equal. The World Bank supports foreign direct investment in mining — a form of investment that doesn’t help the poor.

“Foreign investment in extractive industry doesn’t do a lot to alleviate poverty,” said Dillon. “In fact, it leads very often to polarization of wealth. Capital intensive mining employs very few people with great ecological costs. It’s not the kind of development that’s going to lift the poorest out of poverty.”

In almost every case, mining pulls more wealth out of a country than it invests, said Development and Peace researcher Molly Kane. “If we’re going to talk about developing the private sector in developing countries, there are very different kinds of policies that are needed to do that than the ones that allow foreign corporations to invest more easily and extract wealth more easily,” said Kane.

Money flowing out of Africa and other underdeveloped regions in order to provide a return to distant shareholders often hobbles nations trying to pull their citizens out of poverty, said Dillon.

“If the estimates are anywhere near accurate, you’ve got 10 times as much money flowing out of developing countries through illicit transfers as would be needed to raise their population to $1.25 a day,” he said.

Organizations like Development and Peace, with it’s $10 million per year budget courtesy of Catholic donors, are very minor players when compared to the World Bank and the $30 billion it provided in loans and assistance to countries in 2012. But the role of a Catholic agency working with local NGOs and the international network of Caritas goes beyond the dollars spent on programs, said Casey.

“Poverty is not just economic. We don’t only measure our progress in this in economic terms. It’s much more in human terms, because progress involves structural changes,” he said.

Pope Francis sees the economics of poverty in terms that have more to do with justice than investment rules. He blames “savage capitalism” for our inability to raise up or even see the poor.

“Solidarity, which is the treasure of the poor, is often considered counterproductive, opposed to the logic of finance and the economy,” Pope Francis said May 16. “While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling. This imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to states, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good. A new, invisible and at times virtual tyranny is established, one which unilaterally and irremediably imposes its own laws and rules.”

While that might seem grim, Casey believes there’s plenty that ordinary Catholics and a small organization like Development and Peace can do.

“In terms of a human-based, value-based, human-centred development process — that’s where we fit in.”