· The World Bank’s latest estimates show that 1.4 billion people in developing countries were living in extreme poverty in 2005.
· Recent increases in the price of food have had a direct and adverse effect on the poor and are expected to push many more people – an estimated 100 million – into absolute poverty.
· The proportion of children under five who are undernourished declined from 33 per cent in 1990 to 26 per cent in 2006. However, by 2006, the number of children in developing countries who were underweight still exceeded 140 million .
The MDG(Millennium Development Goals) target of cutting in half the proportion of people in the developing world living on less than $1 a day by 2015 remains within reach for the world as a whole. However, this achievement will be largely the result of extraordinary success in Asia, mostly East Asia. In contrast, little progress has been made in reducing extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa (below the Saharan Desert).
Using a new threshold for extreme poverty now set at $1.25 a day in 2005 prices, the Bank concludes that there were 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty in 2005.
With recent increases in food prices, it is estimated that 1 billion people will go hungry, while another 2 billion will be undernourished.
Almost 50 per cent of children are underweight in Southern Asia. This region alone accounts for more than half the world’s undernourished children, while the majority of countries making the least progress in reducing child malnutrition are in sub-Saharan Africa.
Employed persons living in a household where earnings are less than $1 per person a day are considered the ‘working poor’. In sub-Saharan Africa, over half the workers fall into this category.
Slum dwellers, who account for 1 billion of the worldwide urban population, die earlier, experience more hunger and disease, receive less education and have fewer job opportunities.
WHAT HAS WORKED – This is one of many ideas which are working.
Microfinance has helped many of the world’s poor to increase their incomes through self-employment and empowerment. With access to small loans microfinance clients, mostly women, have formed micro-enterprises that generate income. Grameen Bank of Bangladesh is one of the world’s most successful microfinance institutions. From a starting base of 10 members in 1976, Grameen Bank today has over 7.5 million borrowers, 65 per cent of whom have managed to lift themselves out of extreme poverty . Microfinance institutions provided loans to 113 million clients worldwide
There are now thousands of Microfinance organisations that are helping lift people out of poverty. I have found one organisation in particular which is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending organisation you to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs around the globe. When you loan your money you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.
I’ll be sharing more about this exciting new concept soon.
Challenge for the day: Find out who "Muhammad Yunus" is and what he has done for the fight against extreme poverty.
We obviously think that we are far from rich. I certainly don’t think I am rich. My 8 year old son Samuel I’m sure will be rich. You can ask him at any time how much money he has and will give you a detailed account of his money and both his brother and sister in dollars and cents. He seems to notice even when I borrow a dollar off him.
I did some calculations earlier to work out just how rich you are. Did you know that if you only earn just $10,000 a year you are amongst the 13.72% richest in the world, $20,000 a year 11.97% richest, $30,000 a year %10.22 richest, $40,000 5.73% richest, $50,000 3% richest, $60,000 top 0.99% richest. Wow! (At the current Australian exchange rate)
The world bank now draws extreme poverty at $1.25 a day as being extreme poor. That is not a little poor, that is a lot poor. That is not having any food, not having a roof over your head, unsure where you will find clean water to drink next and worrying if you will live the year through.
At the moment in the world there are 1.4 Billion people who live on less then $1.25 a day. That is an incredible number, a shocking number and a statistic that surely couldn’t be true. But it is. To me it seems so far removed form real life. What can you buy for a $1.25? Not much! Certainly not enough to live on.
So the question is just how rich are you? What can you do now to make a difference for one. You may not be able to feed 100 people. But can you feed one?
Buy a gift for a child. Click here http://trans.worldvision.com.au/Smiles/GiftCatalogue/Gift.aspx?GiftID=79
Challenge for the day: Use your money creatively. Do you have a present to buy for someone? Then why not buy a gift from a charity that changes a life? and see how rich you are on the Global Rich List http://www.globalrichlist.com/
This is a really cool story about one man who did something so LOUD that his whole nation took notice of what he was doing and the message he had. I love this story!
In March 2003, journalist Teun van de Keuken (Tony), voluntarily surrendered to the police in Amsterdam, for eating chocolate illegally produced using slave labor. The police refuse to prosecute him.
On March 22, 2004, Tony became the first Dutchman ever to press criminal charges against himself for the crime of eating chocolate.
The filmmakers first act of protest was personal. One day he ate 19 chocolate bars and then turned himself into police for knowingly buying a product made with slave labor, something he says is criminal under Dutch law.
"At first, I just called the police and said I did a terrible thing. They said, ‘Don’t worry, we all eat chocolate, good-bye.’ Then I hired a lawyer and took himself to court.
In the meantime, he took his TV show to Burkina Faso to find some of the children forced to work on the cocoa plantations — kids, he says, who had never tasted chocolate until he gave them some. (They liked it.)
Tony says recruiters from the Ivory Coast cross the border into the destitute country and lure children over with promises of money or even bicycles. Once they get there, he says, "they’re forced to work, not paid, and not allowed to leave —"
Frustrated by the progress of efforts Tony began producing his own chocolate bars, Tony says they were the first on the market to be packaged as slavery-free. Tony says the bars were an overnight success. "
Challenge for the day: Find out which brands sell fair trade chocolate at your local supermarket. (I’ll be talking about this more soon)
There are 1.4 billion reasons to get LOUD about poverty! At the moment 1.4 billion people worldwide live on less than $1.25 a day.
Could You?
Probably not, so why should we expect others to do so?
At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, 189 Heads of State and Governments pledged to work together to make a better world by 2015. On behalf of their people, they signed the Millennium Declaration which promises to free men, women and children from the dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty and make the right to development a reality for everyone! They agreed upon eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to be achieved by 2015 that respond to the world’s main development challenges.
The Millennium Development goals include:
halving extreme hunger and poverty;
getting all children into school;
making women more equal;
reducing child mortality;
improving maternal health;
combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases;
protecting the environment; and
working in partnership to make poverty history.
There has been some significant success in some MDG areas and a number of targets are expected to be reached by 2015. Here are a few:
• Deaths from measles fell from over 750,000 in 2000 to less than 250,000 in 2006. I think you would agree that’s quite amazing;
• The number of deaths from AIDS fell from 2.2 million in 2005 to 2.0 million in 2007, and the number of people newly infected declined from 3.0 million in 2001 to 2.7 million in 2007;
• The incidence of tuberculosis is expected to be halted and begin to decline before the target date of 2015. This will an awesome accomplishment considering In 2006, there were an estimated 1.7 million deaths due to tuberculosis and 14.4 million people infected with the disease, including approximately 9.2 million new cases
. Alongside some of the amazing successes there are a lot of areas that will fall far short of reaching the goals and need a lot more attention. These are some of them:
• The proportion of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than $1 per day is unlikely to be reduced by the target of one-half;
• About one quarter of all children in developing countries are considered to be underweight and are at risk of having a future blighted by the longterm effects of undernourishment;
• Developed countries’ foreign aid expenditures declined for the second consecutive year in 2007 and risk falling short of the commitments made in 2005;
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During the next 60 day’s I will be sharing thoughts about the MDG’s in bite size chunks. As I’m sharing these thoughts, stop and think about what you could do to make a difference even if it’s just for one person.
I hope that wasn’t an overload. If you have skipped everything I just wrote, check out the YouTube above.
Challenge for the day: Find out more about the Millennium Development Goals by doing a google search or by watching a YouTube.
The Loud Project You can’t turn on the TV or open the newspaper without hearing about freak storms, record temperatures, prolonged drought, disastrous floods and other wacky weather. Now most scientists, we are told believe these events are related, and they’re caused by changes to the earth’s climate. Whats more, it is believed human activity is driving the changes. These changes are called global warming, climate change or climate chaos.
The first people in the firing line as a result of rising sea levels, reduced rainfall and global food shortages are the worlds poor. Many of them already live in marginal environments - the flood plains of Bangladesh or the grazing lands that fringe the Sahara Desert, to name two. These places will be directly affected by global warming. However indirect effects of global warming will include rising food prices, migration and significant economic change.
Challenege for the day: Consider the impact of Global Warming on the world’s poor
(Fortune) — Outside the village of Sinikosson in southwestern Ivory Coast, along a trail tracing the edge of a muddy fishpond, Madi Ouedraogo sits on the ground picking up cocoa pods in one hand, hacking them open with a machete in the other and scooping the filmy white beans into plastic buckets. It is the middle of the school day, but Madi, who looks to be about 10, says his family can’t afford the fees to send him to the nearest school, five miles away. “I don’t like this work,” he says. “I would rather do something else. But I have to do this.”
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Sinikosson, accessible only by rutted jungle tracks, is a long way from the luxurious chocolate shops of New York and Paris. But it is here, on small West African farms like these, that 70 percent of the world’s cocoa beans are grown - 40 percent from just one country, Ivory Coast. It’s not only the landscape that is tough. Working and living conditions are brutal. Most villages lack electricity, running water, health clinics or schools. And to make ends meet, underage cocoa workers, like Madi and the two boys next to him, spend their days wielding machetes, handling pesticides and carrying heavy loads…………….. http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/24/news/international/chocolate_bittersweet.fortune/
Facts
70% of cocoa produced world wide comes from West Africa
40% comes from the Ivory Coast (Cote D’Ivoire)
It is estimated up to 12,000 children have been trafficked for cocoa in West Africa.
It is estimated that in the West African nation of the Ivory Coast alone, more than 600,000 children work on cocoa fields
Most of the Companies of the chocolate that we eat do not guarantee that their products are free of child slavery.
What should our response be? Should we boycott chocolate? What message should we get LOUD about? Should we be eating Fair Trade chocolate? I’ll be posting what I believe the answers to these questions are soon. Challenge for the day: Count how many products you have in your kitchen that contain cocoa and read the link to the article above
Why spend millions on a music video when you can make a very effective one for $15 and give the rest to humanitarian causes?
In this cool video, Sarah McLachlan breaks down how the money would have been spent and how the money was spent:
In LA, catering for a one day shoot = $3000. But this time, $3000 has bought 10950 meals for street children in Calcutta
$5000 = cost of make-up and hair for one day or$5000 = one years schooling for 145 girls in Afghanistan
Most Expensive Music Videos: “Scream” - Michael Jackson & Janet Jackson: $7,000,000. “Victory” - Puff Daddy: $2,700,000+. “Heartbreaker” - Mariah Carey: $2,500,000″What’s It Gonna Be” - Busta Rhymes: $2,400,000+”Larger Than Life” - Backstreet Boys: $2,100,000+”Bedtime Story” - Madonna: $2,000,000+
Challenge for the day: Pull $10 out of your wallet/purse, sit it a spot where you will see it every day. Don’t let it move from that spot until you have an idea or opportunity to use that $10 to do something creatively significant for an awesome cause. I’m going to do the same. Make sure you tell me what you do!
The transatlantic slave trade, which led to the forced removal of up to 12 million African people over 300 years, is one of the ugliest periods in human history. By the end of the eighteenth century, three out of four people on earth lived under some kind of slavery. The slave trade changed Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North and South America economically, demographically and culturally.
The trade in human cargo also created a global market and stimulated major economic growth and the transfer of vast amounts of wealth into the hands of European and American companies.
But through a mass movement that brought together enslaved Africans, anti-slavery campaigners and ordinary members of the public, the slave trade came to an end during the mid-nineteenth century. The abolition of the transatlantic slave trade is one of the modern greatest moral triumphs. This makes the re-emergence of modern slavery all the more shocking.
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Slavery ended because former slaves toured Britain, talking about life on the plantation and slave ships, while anti-slavery activists demonstrated handcuffs, shackles and thumbscrews. The campaigners used the postal service, newspapers, books and pamphlets. They held meetings. They were powered by a belief that human beings had the capacity to care about others. The campaign in Britain was something the world had never seen before - the first time a large number of became outraged over someone else’s rights.
. Within a few years, more than 300,000 Britains were refusing to eat slave-grown sugar. An abolition commitee existed in every major town or city. Parliament was flooded with pettitions: the one from Edinburgh stretched the floor of the commons floor; 20,000 .
The abolition of slavery only happened because people got LOUD! Modern slavery is worth getting LOUD about! Modern slavery will only disappear if you and I get LOUD!
One of my good mates back in Australia, Peter Rees - a passionate justice advocate and a mighty force for inspiring people to engage in global action has stared a new 60-day blog where everyday he will give us ways we can get active and be LOUD on some key justice issues. I think its such an awesome idea, so I’ll be re-posting his articles here and tweet the exciting journey. So join in and change the world!
People who achieve great things in the face of adversity inspire us all. This is one of the most inspiring stories I have read this year because of that very reason. Jeremy Gilley has achieved this amazing day, a global day of non violence, a day in which thousands of people’s lives have been saved.
Jeremy Gilley is an English actor, filmmaker and founder of the charity Peace One Day. Disturbed by the images of violence and destruction in every day life, Gilley had an idea: What if there was one day when the world stopped fighting? A worldwide ceasefire – a non-violence day? A Peace Day? He decided to find out if that was possible, and to document his efforts along the way. Gilley realized that the best way to achieve an annual Peace Day was to obtain a UN resolution. With help from family and friends, he was able to send thousands of letters, make hundreds of phone calls and travel the equivalent of 7 times around the world. In 2001, Gilley achieved his goal.
Gilley had amazing, impossible idea to change the world through a single day. How did he do it? He had an idea and he got LOUD!
This video explains the global issue of slavery in the most creative way I’ve ever seen. The story they depict is only one of 27 million, but it is a reality that many of them share! Its time we get active! Visit www.notforsalecampaign.org now.
