At the heart of every human experience is the desire to survive and prosper. To live without fear, hunger or suffering. To imagine how your life could be better and then have the means yourself to change it. Yet, every day, 1.2 billion people – one fifth of the world’s inhabitants – cannot fulfil their most basic needs, let alone attain their dreams or desires.

 

The largest segment of the world’s poor are the 800 million poor women, children and men who live in rural environments. These are the subsistence farmers and herders, the fishers and migrant workers, the artisans and indigenous peoples whose daily struggles seldom capture world attention.

Empowering rural people is an essential first step to eradicating poverty. It respects the willingness and capability that each of us has to take charge of our own life and to seek out opportunities to make it better.

Statistics

Poverty, hunger and malnutrition

• More than one billion people in the world live on less than US$1 a day
• 2.7 billion struggle to survive on less than US$2 per day
• More than 800 million people go to bed hungry every day, including 300 million children *
• Every 3.6 seconds a person dies of starvation, and most of those who die are children under age of 5
• Every year 6 million children die from malnutrition before their fifth birthday

Agriculture

• The African continent, once a net exporter of food, imports one third of its grain
• More than 40 per cent of Africans do not have the ability to obtain sufficient food on a daily basis
• For African farmers, conventional fertilizers cost two to sixtimes more than the world market price

HIV/AIDS

• Every day HIV/AIDS kills 6,000 people and infects another 8,200 people with the deadly virus
• The HIV/AIDS pandemic, along with declining soil fertility and land degradation, have led to a 23 per cent decrease in food production per capita

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.