Since 1990, the fraction of people living on less than $1/day has decreased. Multiplying that fraction by the total population gives several hundred million people. They are affected to an extent of, say, 4 life-years, for a total of about 1 billion life-years.

Human News aims to devote 1 character to each 40,000 life-years, or 1000 average lives. Thus, this story can have about 1 billion / 40,000 = 25,000 characters. Since this article is only about 6500 characters, there is opportunity for future articles on this subject.