"We are the first generation in the history of the world who can realistically say that we can end extremepoverty in our time."
Currently, more than eight million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive. Ourgeneration can choose to end that extreme poverty by the year 2025. Every morning our newspapers could report, "More than20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty." The stories would put the stark numbers in context –up to 8,000children dead of malaria, 5,000 mothers and fathers dead of tuberculosis, 7,500 young adults dead of AIDS, and thousandsmore dead of diarrhoea, respiratory infection, and other killer diseases that prey on bodies weakened by chronic hunger. Thepoor die in hospital wards that lack drugs, in villages that lack anti-malarial bed nets, in houses that lack safe drinking water.They die namelessly, without public comment. Sadly, such stories rarely get written. Most people are unaware of the dailystruggles for survival, and of the vast numbers of impoverished people around the world who lose that struggle.
Imagine, if you can, what it would be like to live on less than one dollar a day. Then look around your Rotary Club: If itwere a microcosm of today’s world, one in five of your fellow Rotarians would be living in extreme poverty. One in sevenwould be suffering from chronic hunger.
Poverty and hunger, even when reduced to their simplest definitions, are overwhelming in scope. But in a plan as ambitiousas the problems are intimidating, the United Nations is aiming to cut extreme poverty and hunger in half by 2015. In 2000,the UN set out a framework to address fundamental global problems through a series of eight goals – the MillenniumDevelopment Goals. Along with taking on poverty and hunger, the goals include
establishing universal education programs and combating diseases such as HIV / AIDS.
A world where some live in comfort and plenty, while half of the human race lives on less than $2 a day, is neither just nor stable. Including all of the world’s poor in an expanding circle of development – and opportunity – is a moral imperative and one of the top priorities of all like minded Rotarians.
Rotarians of R.I. District 3150 have joined hands with Rotarians in R.I. District 9680, Australia to break the cycle of poverty of the poor in the Vinukonda area by giving milch cattle to underprivileged women. These cattle yield an income of US$ 50 per month thus ensuring a healthy happy family.
This project is truly a project that exhibits Building Communities and Bridging Continents.
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