Alleviating Poverty as a Lived Polycrisis Through Inclusive Phygital Solutions

Abstract

As the first goal of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), poverty (SDG 1) is increasingly experienced as a polycrisis, wherein interconnected crises compound and amplify one another. Income shortfalls, in particular, intersect with digital exclusion, food insecurity, housing instability, health shocks, and learning loss, producing reinforcing disadvantages that standard, siloed interventions rarely interrupt. This commentary advances a macromarketing argument that phygital solutions, defined as the deliberate integration of physical and digital resources to deliver solutions that function across systems, can help address poverty's polycrisis when design priorities shift from adoption to inclusion. The commentary proceeds in four parts. First, the discussion clarifies the distinctive value of commentary as a genre in a field where empirical and review formats often lag fast-moving contextual disruptions. Second, the discussion situates poverty's polycrisis using current global evidence across digital access, education, employment, food, health, and housing while foregrounding the rise of urban poverty alongside the persistence of rural poverty. Third, the discussion consolidates contemporary phygital scholarship and develops a macromarketing model of inclusive phygital solutions to alleviate poverty polycrisis . Fourth, the discussion synthesizes the argument and offers action-oriented directions for policy, practice, and research.