The Micah Challenge

The Micah Challenge website is online. Go there and check it out.

Some facts:

• The world is enjoying unprecedented wealth, and yet more than one billion people live in abject poverty, struggling to get by on less than $1 a day. Each day, 50,000 people die from preventable, poverty-related causes. 850 million people go to bed hungry every night.
• Today, 15 million children are orphans because of AIDS. One in six AIDS-related deaths is now a child.
• Every 3.6 seconds, another person dies of needless poverty.
• Today, the richest three people in the world own assess that exceed the combined economic activity of the world's poorest 48 countries.
• If the world had 1,000 people, 600 of those would live in a shantytown.
• A woman in sub-Saharan Africa is 200 times more likely to die in childbirth than a woman in North America. That's 1 in 16 in that part of Africa that die in childbirth.
• Closer to where I live, the disparity between rich and poor neighborhoods in the city of Etobicoke is increasing. There has been a 69% increase in poor families in Toronto over the past twenty years. The community in which I live (lots of apartment buildings) has moved from moderate poverty in 1991 to high poverty in 2001.