Facts and figures

In a world where a few hundred millionaires own as much wealth as the world’s poorest 2.5 billion people, poverty is a choice made by the rich, not by the poor.

• More than 8 million people die each year from abject poverty
• Half the world – nearly three billion people – live on less than $2 a day
• Almost a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read or sign their names
• 852 million people do not have enough to eat, 1.3 billion have no safe water, 2 billion have no access to electricity and 3 billion have no sanitation
• Hunger and malnutrition are the number one risk to global health, killing more people than AIDS, malaria and TB put together.

Children are the future – aren’t they?

• Of the 2.2 billion children in the world, one billion – almost half – live in poverty
• 10.9 million children die every year before they reach the age of five
• A child dies every five seconds because she or he is hungry
• Every year, 17 million children are born undernourished because their mothers don’t have enough to eat
• More than a billion children will not go to school this year – 65% of them girls.

Who ate all the pies?

• 15 of the world’s 100 wealthiest bodies are corporations
• A few hundred millionaires own as much wealth as the world’s poorest 2.5 billion people
• The combined economic output of a quarter of the world’s countries is less than the wealth of the world’s three richest men.

Who lives? Who dies?

• In Bolivia and Peru, babies are four to five times as likely to die if they are born in the poorest 20% of the population than the richest 20%
• 80% of all Ethiopians live on less than two dollars a day – and 26% on less than a dollar
• Life expectancy in Afghanistan is just 43 years. In Zimbabwe it is 37 years.

It’s a matter of choice

• Just one week’s worth of the subsidies given to farmers in rich countries would cover the annual cost of global food aid
• $20 billion is spent on cosmetics in the United States each year – more than double the $9 billion it would take to provide basic water and sanitation for everyone
• Annual global military spending exceeds $1 trillion. That’s a thousand billion dollars – around 100 times what it would cost to put every child in the world through primary school.

Information source: Christian Aid

If you can pledge to give us a regular donation, it offers us the kind of enduring support we need to stand by poor communities and help them achieve lasting change.