Christian Aid
Today 1.3 billion people live in extreme poverty. Tonight 800 million people will go to bed hungry. This year 12 million children will die before their fifth birthday. At the start of a century of unprecedented wealth, we reject a world where such suffering exists amid such plenty.
It needn’t be like that. We can hope for a better world, where everyone lives a full life, free from poverty. And we have the power to turn that hope into action.
Hope is about doing, not dreaming. It makes things change. Since 1950, life expectancy in developing countries has risen by 20 years, access to clean water has doubled, child death rates have halved, and food production has grown 20 per cent faster than population.
The unprecedented economic development of the last few decades has created unprecedented wealth, as well as pockets of extreme deprivation, across the globe. But it’s not simply a matter of economics.
Poverty has been eroded partly because people have fought together for justice: rich and poor, North and South, people of all faiths and all races. They didn’t give in to despair. They hoped – and acted.
